


Newsies

by captainodonewithyou



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Journalism, Newsies - Freeform, period fic, underground publishing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 09:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5864011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainodonewithyou/pseuds/captainodonewithyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is 1899 and Daisy Johnson is a New York newsie who lives on the streets with her best friend, Fitz, and manages to just get by.  That is, until the price for papers goes up, and suddenly she must fight against powers bigger than her world to keep herself and her friends from being forced under.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Carrying the Banner

The sky is fading purple when the shuddering of the metal fire escape draws her from the heavy stillness of her slumber and back into the cool and clouded air that sleep had only just shrouded from biting at her skin.  Aligning all of her senses takes a beat and a reaching stretch of her aching limbs, back protesting as she draws herself reluctantly upright from the relative comfort of the carefully collected bits of material that serve as her bed.

Her eyes strain through the dusky darkness for the source of the ruckus.  A crooked silhouette shifts awkwardly in the still air and Daisy rubs her blurry eyes tiredly with the back of her hand as she fights back the massive yawn that rises up the back of her throat.

“Hey, what are you _doing_?” She calls through the darkness, not bothering to waste the extra energy it would cost to mask her annoyance. “The morning bell hasn’t rung yet. Go back to sleep.”

The movements don’t cease, and she drops her heavy head frustrated back against the cool railing of the escape behind her, trying to smother the ebbing tide of sleep still fighting to regain control of her consciousness.  The creaking of the entire metal platform helps, squeaking reluctantly in her ears as her roommate continues to feign deafness.

“I wan’ to get to the square before the others,” his heavily accented voice finally mutters back through the shadows between them as her eyes familiarize themselves with the darkness.  She can make out the light curls on her friend’s head as he leans fully on the railing, guiding himself towards the ladder with one hand, brandishing his heavily used, cracking crutch beneath the other. He doesn’t tell her why he is getting an early start, but today’s added reliance on the rusty railing answers that for her.

She sighs the last wisps of sleepiness from her lungs and rises reluctantly to her perpetually aching feet, watching Fitz continue his stubborn movements.

“You know how many of the guys fake a limp for sympathy?” She asks, tearing her eyes away and reaching into the ratty bag tied to the rail behind her to find her few threadbare possessions still there. She glances over her shoulder, knowing it is shitty consolation but hoping it gives her friend something to hold onto anyway, “that bum leg of yours is a _goldmine_.”

He pauses, and her eyes aren’t good enough to make out the details of his expression through the shadows that still haven’t been broken by the lightening sky – but her intuition is pretty solid, and she is pretty sure he is scowling at her.

“I don’ need any of them getting the idea I can’ take care of m’self,” he tells her dryly as he reaches the ladder. “They think I can’ an’ they’ll lock me up in the bloody _Refuge_ for good.”

She clenches her jaw at the mention of the place, suddenly far more attune to exactly how cold the New York air feels against her cheeks.  She sharply pulls the little bundle of possessions from within her bag, busying herself with untangling the vest she stole from a clothesline a few weeks back when the balmy summer breezes had begun to carry a chill through the streets.

The metal creaks again and she checks again over her shoulder to see Fitz lowered carefully to a seat, good and bad foot hung precariously over the edge of the escape as he surveys his course of action – looking more like the stray he’d been when she found him than he would ever care for her to tell him.

“Just wait a second,” she says, letting out another breath as she bends to scoop her cap from where it had fallen at her feet from within the vest, pulling it over her short hair to successfully trap another bit of warmth, “I’ll help you down.”

Except he doesn’t wait a second, clinging to the railing with two hands as he tries to pivot to face the ladder, making a small noise of surprise when his foot slips from the rung and suddenly he is only clinging to the escape with ten white-knuckled fingers.  Her heart jumps in her chest as she stumbles over his abandoned crutch and towards him to grasp his wrists before his hands slip, more relieved than she should be that neither of them have had a real meal in a week so he isn’t too heavy for her to help him drag his weight back up onto the platform.

“Are you trying to bust your other leg, too!?” She chides, annoyance back in full as a result of the very sharp and very unwelcome wake-up call to her senses.  She sure as hell is awake now.

It isn’t too dark to see the glare he throws at her this time, but it is too laced with relief to be angry.

“No!” he snaps, but his face is pale from the shock. “I just wan’ ta go down!”

She clenches her teeth, trying to swallow the bad mood that is attempting to settle into place for the day as she turns away from him again, stepping over his crutch to fetch her bag from the railing and probably taking out a little more frustration than she should on the tightly knotted strap.

“You’ll be down in a minute, just _relax_ and enjoy the view,” she tells him, filling her lungs and closing her eyes before counting to ten and slowly letting the air escape through her nose.

She looks up, when she reopens her eyes, taking her own advice.  The glimpses of sky she can catch above the grey buildings are warming up into light pastels of pink and orange that contrast the dark depression of the rest of the city. She drinks the calm beauty of the shades in.

“You are crazy.” Fitz breaks the silence after a moment, and despite the words her friend’s tone is affectionate.  The escape creaks as he drags his crutch beneath him and uses it to rise back to his feet.

“How is hating this dungeon crazy?” She challenges, drawing herself away from the comfort, raising an eyebrow at Fitz. “What is _crazy_ is that the rest of you don’t care about being able to see the stars.”

He shakes his head, his messy hair beginning to shine in the stray sun rays between the buildings, as he lets out a dry little laugh.

“You see th’ stars alright Daisy, no one is questioning tha’.”

She grasps the cool railing, peering down at the contrast of the foggy, dark streets below them and shrugs.

“I’ve seen enough people have the life dragged out of them working their asses off to please the city,” she says dryly, watching a tiny speck of a rat skitter out of the gutter and between the cracks in the stones. “It just takes and takes. Call me what you want, but I am _not_ gonna let that be me.”

Fitz is shaking his head.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” she prods, drawing away from the railing and towards her friend.  “We don’t _have_ to live like we do day in and day out.  Everyone coming here has got the wrong idea.  Out West, that’s where living is easy,” she coaxes and then pauses, eyes drifting to his bad leg and then pointedly back to his eyes. “no one cares about a bum leg in Santa Fe.”

The shaking of his head has grown more profuse as she continues, and when she names the city he lets out a long-suffering sigh.

“You’ve never even been ou’side o’ New York.  You don’ know _any_ o’ that.”

“Maybe not,” she shrugs, even though the truth in Fitz’s words stings. “But I sure as _hell_ know that nowhere can be worse than here.”

Fitz looks like he has plenty more to say about it, but when he opens his mouth he is interrupted by the first of the five echoing toils from the church a few blocks down the pebbled road.

“Guess that means the time for dreaming is done.”

The joke is halfhearted, but she offers Fitz one more small smile before crossing to the broken window set into the bricks that the escape hangs precariously off of.  She ducks her head through the shards with a practiced precision, blinking past the darkness.

“Hey! Boys, get a move on,” she calls into the shadows that are just beginning to shift in response to the dual disruption of her wake-up call and the church bells, just chiming to a stop on the fifth note. “The papers aren’t gonna sell themselves!”

She waits until she begins to hear frustrated complaints in tired voices before she retreats from the window, finding the last few buttons on her vest before moving towards the ladder and helping shift Fitz fully onto it.  She watches him reach the ground safely before pulling her messenger bag snuggly over her shoulder, balancing his crutch on an arm and following.

A few of the boys have already gathered when she joins them, muttering a couple dreary “mornings,” as she situates Fitz with his crutch and “mornings” them back while they wait on the others.

It is a remarkable smell, all the street rats gathered together – one that they all pretend not to notice anymore.  There are a few faucets in the old tenant house that still run water, but soap is a luxury that none of the boys are particularly inclined to put out for, not when they’ll only be dirty again after a day in the streets – the only motivation they have to clean at all is that no one wants to buy a pape from a kid that smells like the back alleys of the city.  Or at least that is what Daisy tries to tell them, mostly for her own sanity – but it is clear that today, like most days, no one has bothered.

She doesn’t say anything.

“Hey Fitz, what’s the leg say?” Romeo asks when he pops out the door, “Gonna rain?”

“Oh, uh –“ Fitz pauses, touching his knee with a dramatic air and staring past the boys with an exaggeratedly focused expression. “Eh, no rain… partly cloudy… clear by evening.”

He stands back upright, grinning around at their laughing friends.

“You’ve got it made, kid –“ Henry chuckles, “that limp alone sells 50 papes a week.”

Fitz feigns offense.

“It takes the limp,” Romeo smirks, but his tone is nearly consoling.

“He would sell even more if he was also blind,” someone else chimes in.

“And mute,” Fitz agrees, joining into the game with a smile.

“They’d feel especially bad if he was dead,” Daisy adds with a roll of her eyes, “bet he’d make a solid 70 sales a week.”

Hunter is the last of the boys to scuttle tiredly out from the house, still rubbing sleep from his eyes – and they are off together as soon as he appears.  It is Saturday so they trek two blocks south to the church first, for the stale scraps the Sisters stand outside and give them.  Then they retrace those blocks plus another four to Newsie Square where they crowd up against the bright silver sheen of the _World_ ’s front gates, finish whatever scraps they are still clinging to – and wait.

Fed, the boys’ energy picks up, and Daisy leans against the brick wall and watches them hurl affectionate insults to and fro as the town slowly wakes up along with them – well-dressed people with clean faces passing through the square in what seems like an entirely different plane of existence from Daisy and the boys – never even seeming to see the hoard of dirty children in ripped up clothes just beneath their noses.

But even if they don’t see her, she likes watching them -- in all of their soft colors and bright faces – she can stare at them all she wants, and they’ll never notice.  Not from the parallel universe they all live in.

She wonders if the city only treats these pretty people kindly because they have the money to put a nice strong door up to block it out.

“Think it’ll be a good headline today, Daisy?” Albert calls over the heads of the other boys, nodding at the blackboard over Pulitzer’s wagons behind the gate, where the headline will be written up just before they are let in to buy their papers and take to the streets.

“Dunno,” she answers. “Probably not. What do you want it to be?”

He smirks.

“I hope it is somethin real bloody.  With a nice clear picture to go along with it.”

“ _That_ pape would sell itself,” she laughs as he returns to whatever conversation he is having with Fitz, and she returns to watching the pairs and trios of real people with real lives press on through the square.

Her eyes falter on a man with particularly bright blonde hair that catches the sunlight and burns a shade of pure sunny gold that is so natural and near in appearance to the light that shines from the sky that she is transfixed.  He stands out in an odd contrast to the unnaturally colored clothes dressing the people around him and the stark grey streets they walk on.

She is startled when his eyes settle on her own, subtle and clear like the sky beyond the clouds of the city – _seeing_ her.

He offers her a lopsided smile that makes her heart patter before disappearing past her into the crowd and out of her sight.  She doesn’t realize she is still staring after where he disappeared until one of the boys prods her shoulder, letting out an obnoxious wolf-whistle.

“And here I thought the great Daisy Johnson was too otherworldly to experience good ole attraction,” Romeo smirks, and she shoves his shoulder, glaring halfheartedly.

“Ever consider the issue might not have been that I don’t experience attraction at all, but just that I don’t experience attraction to _you_?” She asks, sweeping her eyes up his body pointedly and earning laughter and low whistles from the rest of the boys for the hit. Romeo snorts, nodding in acknowledgement of his defeat.

“Hey, they’re puttin’ up th’ headline!” Fitz calls from the fence, and Daisy shifts up against the cool metal along with the others, straining to see the shaky letters being chalked up onto the board in the distance.

_**TROLLEY WORKER STRIKE ENTERS 6TH WEEK** _

“Again!?” One of the boy’s whines, and the rest join in with their own mumbled disapprovals.

“That ain’t news anymore.”

They’re right – it isn’t, and it makes it damn hard to sell.

“Move back,” a man calls from within the fence, and Daisy steps out of the way with the others as the boys turn their griping onto the squirrelly Delancey brothers – who scowl at them from behind the safety of the gate and have absolutely no trouble giving shit straight back.

“Come on, move so we can get in and get our papes,” she speaks tiredly, but certainly not out of any sympathy for the bullies who are having little success with their harsh biting words -- and the boys reluctantly do as she says, stepping out of the way so that the Delancey’s can unlock the gate and swing it open.

“What a terrible smell,” Romeo muses as he passes the duo, looking them up and down disdainfully. “I hear’d a rumor you boys took money to crush heads at the trolley workers strike.”

Morris shrugs, but a smug grin comes over his twisted expression.

“Paid damn well,” he says thoughtfully after a moment with a pointed bravado, and Specs has to grab Romeo’s arm to keep him from throwing a fist between his eyes.

They file through and Daisy takes the rear, shooting the brothers a threatening glare when one of them snaps something unintelligible at Fitz, certainly completely unbidden -- as unlike the other boys, Fitz was rarely interested in discourse of any sort.  He pretends to ignore them with the same practice with which he had ignored her that morning, and when they continue snarling after him, protectiveness flames up more fully in her gut.

“Don’t be mean,” she says coolly as she passes by them, scowling between their two pairs of working legs before remeeting their gazes in turn, “One day one of you might have a bum leg, and I don’t think you’d like us treating you the same way.”

They glare at her but value themselves enough not to talk back, experienced enough after years of her beating up on them to protect the boys to know better.

They pass the wagons that are still unloading, and Daisy steps past the loitering boys to pick up her papers first, reaching deep into her pocket as she approaches the stacks.

“Morning, Weasel,” she smiles bright and sarcastic and the burly man who runs the stacks, and he breaths a long sigh.

“It’s _Wiesel_. You _know_ that.”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” her smile melts into a smirk as she finally finds the coin in the bottom of her pocket, dropping it in front of him. “I’ll take the usual.”

He shakes his head tiredly.

“The usual for Daisy,” he tells the man beside him, who counts her a stack and hands it over for her to shove into her empty bag.  She does, and steps aside as the others begin to follow her lead – griping at Wiesel, buying their papers and slipping back out the gate to stake out the streets.

Daisy hesitates, however – because a few spots back in the line, mingled among the familiar faces of her boys are two faces she has never seen before.

When the girl reaches the front of the line, she requests 20 papers with a nearly comedic air of authority, considering who and what the lot of them are.

“That’ll be a dime,” Wiesel says, and the girl squares her small shoulders as the younger boy in front of her steps forward to take the papers.

“I’ll pay you after I sell them,” she says with that same perfect diction and air of respectability, and Wiesel looks so completely affronted that Daisy snorts out loud – quickly covering her mouth with a hand as she watches the riffraff unfurl.

“Funny, kid.  Come on, cash upfront.”

She hesitates, calm demeanor only cracking when she runs an anxious hand through her copper hair.

“Whatever I don’t sell you do buy back, yeah?”

This time it is Wiesel who laughs out loud.

“Certainly, and every time you lose a tooth I’ll stick a penny under your pillow,” he says sarcastically, and Hunter chortles behind the girl until Daisy shoots him a glare that pointedly reminds him to remember whose side he is on. “Pay up, kid.”

She lets out a breath, nodding slowly even if her shoulders have sunk slightly – offering up her dime and moving forward to take the papers from the little boy that Daisy assumes is her younger brother by their matching wideset picture-of-innocence doe-eyes.

Daisy continues to watch as the girl purses her lips and flips down the papers – _counting them._

“Wow,” Fitz mutters, limping up beside Daisy with a smirk, leaning sideways on his crutch and watching the girl alongside her.

Daisy shakes her head in disbelief.

“Wow,” she agrees.

They watch her count them twice, nimble fingers flipping carefully through the soft pages.

And then she steps back up to Wiesel.

“Excuse me, sir – I bought 20 newspapers and you only gave me 19.”

“Are you going t’ help her?” Fitz asks, predictable empathy seeping into his tone, and Daisy sighs.

“I probably should, shouldn’t I.”

“It woul’ be nice of you.”

Daisy sighs again, deeper this time, but steps back up to the table, pulling the papers from the surprised girl’s grasp and holding them out of her reach as she counts them herself.  Wiesel looks shocked to still see her there as she slowly goes through the pages, not bothering to actually count them but mocking the girl’s movements close enough for it to look like she does.

“She’s right,” she confirms after a moment, turning back towards the table and holding up her hands in surrender when she snatches her papers angrily back from her -- but not looking away from Wiesel. “You owe her another pape.  Pay up, kid,” she mocks with a confident smirk.  The boys chime in behind Daisy’s lead, calling out for the new girl to be given what she is owed.

Alone, the girl didn’t stand a chance against the men.  But by claiming the stray, Daisy has made her more trouble than she is worth – and Wiesel shoves another paper angrily at her chest.

“Give her an extra 10,” Daisy adds after a moment, reaching back into her pocket for the last coin she has – eyes on the chubby-cheeked brother who can’t be over ten years old – who is watching her back with admiration in his wide eyes.

“I’m not a charity case,” the girl snaps, fiery eyes on Daisy. “And I don’t want extra newspapers or your help.”

“What kind of Newsie doesn’t want extra papers?” Daisy asks with a raise of her brow, ignoring the rest of the girl’s angry words. “Anyway, don’t worry, they aren’t for you.”

She takes the extra stack Wiesel holds out to her and drops them neatly into the little boy’s arms, smiling when his already saucer-sized eyes widen further.

“Believe me,” Hunter interrupts over his shoulder, finally putting down a coin for his own papers, “You want her help.  This is _Daisy Johnson_. You got her help and you’re learning from the best.”

The distrust in the other girl’s eyes doesn’t falter, despite Hunter’s shining endorsement.

“ _Gee_ ,” the little boy muses excitedly, “The same Daisy Johnson who escaped from the _Refuge_ in the back of Governor Roosevelt’s carriage!?”

“That never happened, Les,” the older sister chides, and Daisy just shrugs with a smile, guiding the kid – Les – away from the stand and helping him adjust his satchel across his small shoulders.

“Hey, how old are you, kid?” She asks when she is happy with the situation of his satchel.  He stands up taller.

“I’m 10,” he announces proudly, but then hesitates.  “ _Almost_ 10\.  Jemma –“ he nods towards his sister, “is almost 18. And I’m almost 10.”

Daisy nods, sizing him up with narrowed eyes.

“If anyone asks, you’re seven,” she tells him, and he nods obediently without a question, but she goes on anyway in a slightly lowered voice, “see, if you’re younger you sell more papes, and if we’re gonna be partners—“

“Wait, who said anything about partners?” Jemma interrupts – _perpetually_ angry.

“Me,” Daisy says, patience beginning to wane, “just now.”

She deserves the scowl Jemma throws her.

“If you’re so great, why would you want to sell with us?” She asks accusingly.

“You’ve got a kid brother,” she answers easily, “I don’t. His face could sell a thousand papes a week.”

She still looks dubious.

“Kid, look sad,” Daisy orders.  Les widens his watery eyes on cue, pulling a pout across his lips and staring emptily into the distance. Daisy nods sideways at the heartbreaking expression, biting down a triumphant smirk as she stares back at Jemma. “We’re gonna make millions.”

A long moment passes, but Jemma finally nods.

xx

“Factory explosion leaves 3 dead and more wounded!” Daisy calls loudly when she catches sight of a movement at the end of the street, extra motivated now by the lightness of her empty bag.  “You heard it here first!”

She feels Jemma’s ever-dubious eyes prickling at the back of her neck and makes a point of ignoring it as the man approaches, eyeing the paper with interest. “Read all about it!” she adds, offering it out to him.  He nods, taking the paper and dropping a coin in her outstretched palm.  She watches him disappear down the road, then smirks back over her shoulder at Jemma.

“Easy,” she tells her.

“You _lied_ ,” she responds. “You just made that story up!”

Daisy smirks, shaking her head.

“I told him he heard it here first,” she challenges. “And he did.”

Jemma scowls fully at her, reaching out to pull Les, who is staring up at Daisy with eyes full of admiration, back up close to her.

“Misleading and lying are the same thing.  Our parents taught us not to lie.”

“My parents taught me not to starve,” she shoots back with an unfriendly smile.  “Sell papes your way, put them to sleep – it isn’t my problem.”

Jemma shakes her head, reaching into her bag and coming up with a paper – going on as if she hasn’t heard Daisy.

“I’ve just got one left,” she says, and Les swipes it from his sister’s hand, hopping out onto the sidewalk as a young woman approaches.  Daisy sinks back into the shadows with Jemma, watching the little boy.

“Buy a pape from a poor little orphan boy?” he pleads with the sad look he put on earlier.

The lady begins to shake her head, and he catches on quickly, ducking his little head to the side and faking a gut-wrenching cough that stops the woman in her tracks.  Daisy tries to bite back her smile as she glances sideways at Jemma, who lets out a defeated sigh as the woman forks over a dime and takes their final paper.

“You’re a natural, kid,” Daisy praises as she hops from the shadows after the woman has disappeared.  She runs an approving hand through the boy’s hair, and he grins brightly, clearly proud of his work.

“This is _so much better_ than school!” He announces with excitement, and Jemma quickly steps between them.

Daisy feels her spirits drop at the reality of the kid’s words.

“Don’t even think it, Les,” Jemma says sharply, holding out her hand for the change he has gathered.  He forks it over in three little handfuls from his pockets, and she carefully divides Daisy’s share out, holding it out to her but still watching her brother. “This is only until father gets his job back.”

An awkward stillness falls between them as Les nods at his sister’s words, and Daisy searches for something to fill the pressing silence as she buries her coins into the depths of her pocket.

“Look, lets get outta the streets,” she says. “We’ll find you two some food and a safe place to stay the night –“

“Actually…” Jemma interrupts, shifting uneasily beneath Daisy’s eyes. “Our mum’ll be expecting us home for supper.”

Daisy recovers quickly, smiling crookedly to prove that the words don’t mean anything to her -- however taken aback she might actually be.  She doesn’t often meet kids that’ve got a home.

“Right, yeah – you’d better get going then.”

“You should come to dinner!” Les proposes excitedly, and Jemma actually smiles a bit at the suggestion, nodding her approval.

“Mum is a great cook, she’d love to have you.”

But Daisy takes a step away, insides turning at the offer – however kind.

“No, I forgot, I’ve got someplace to be,” she lies, taking another step back into the alley and faking a smile. “I’ve got someone to meet and I’ve already kept him waiting.”

“Is that him?” Les asks, pointing down the road in a direction she can’t see. “He’s been waiting.”

Her brow furrows as she steps uneasily back out of the alley, following the little boy’s pointed finger down the block.  A man in a dark suit loiters on the corner, sharp eyes only searching a moment before settling on her.

“Shit,” she mutters, glancing side to side as she sizes up an escape route that the new kids won’t have trouble following.  It is only a beat before the man at the end of the street is making a pointed beeline towards her.

“What is it?” Jemma asks, forehead lining with concern as she looks between Daisy and the man.

“Grab Les,” she says under her breath, heart pounding. “Follow me. And _run_.”


	2. "Unioned" We Stand

“Does someone want to tell me why I’m running,” Jemma puffs as Daisy slams the wide theater window shut behind them, flipping the lock firmly into place and leaning back against the wall – clutching the aching crick in her side as her burning lungs fight to refill her with oxygen, “because I have not got anyone chasing me!”

Daisy holds up a finger, still gasping in the warm air of the theater and urging the fast pulse thundering against her skull to slow.  Jemma crosses her arms over her own heaving chest, watching her with narrowed eyes and waiting for her answer.

“Daisy, who  _ was _ that guy?” She prompts again with a hint of concern that Daisy isn’t quite used to being on the receiving end of – especially from Jemma.

She looks around the comforting orange glow of the upper catwalk of the theater as she draws a few more lung-fulls of air.

“That,” Daisy finally says breathily, “was Snyder the Spider. A  _ real  _ sweetheart,” she pauses, filling her protesting lungs with another heavy, full breath. “He runs a jail for underage kids – The Refuge. The more he locks up, the more he gets paid.”

She spits the words out in disgust, pushing herself back upright off of the cool brick wall and striding past the siblings, towards the ladder down the other end of the catwalk.

“Do yourselves a favor,” she adds dryly as she passes them, looking between the innocent wide-eyed faces of her new friends. “Stay clear of him, and of the Refuge.”

She lowers herself down the ladder and waits for Les and Jemma to follow before leading them through a set of heavy velvet curtains and back behind the stage with sure practiced steps.  The warm orange glow is fuller here, lighting up bare brick walls and thick coiled ropes and scattered canvas backdrops, painted in complementary pastel shades.

“Woah,” Les muses, “what is this place!?”

He stares wide eyed between the sets and half-built wooden structures, turning in a slow circle to take everything in until Jemma puts a hand on his upper back to steady him to a stop.

“It’s a theater, Les. You know that.”

He looks disdainfully up at his sister.

“Well I never seen a theater like this before,” he defends, and Jemma drops the argument with a sigh.

“It is the back-part,” Daisy tells his still-curious eyes, nodding sideways at the curtains they’d passed through. “The other side is what you see, usually.  Back here, it’s where things get put together.”

She glances at one of the half-painted backdrops, then at her feet.

“Is someone in here!?” The voice comes from the curtains, and a moment later a dark-haired woman in a solemn business-like dress appears through them.  Her eyes fall on Les and Jemma, brow furrowing in surprise. “How’d you two get in?” She asks in a carefully hushed backstage voice, “There’s no children in the theater.”

Jemma and Les open their mouths emptily, and Daisy plants a smile on her face as she steps forward, raising a hand to attract the woman’s attention.

“Not even me, May?”

Recognition fills the older woman’s expression when her eyes fall on Daisy, lighting up.

“So you are still around,” her voice is dry but her eyes are smiling, “I was starting to think you were going to leave me high and dry with all these unfinished backdrops,” she adds, nodding at the pretty scenes scattered about. 

“’course not,” Daisy tells her, but one of May’s eyebrows flicks up to call her blatant bluff with ease -- Daisy is a good liar, but she still has never managed to get anything past the woman’s sharp mind.

Les is wandering again, this time up closer to one of the backdrops with his mouth agape – his sister not far behind him, her own eyes wide as she takes in the details of the strokes on canvas.

“You pictured these!?” Les asks Daisy in awe, and they both look expectantly back at her.  She scratches uneasily behind her ear as she shrugs, trying not to notice all the imperfections in the pieces glaring down around her.

“She’s got a natural aptitude,” May tells him with one of her patented half smiles, eyes never drifting from Daisy’s. “By the time you finish this next set I might even have the money to pay you for your trouble,” she adds, and Daisy shakes her head.

“Don’t get so worked up,” she mutters, rolling her eyes, “They’re just a bunch of trees. I’m not taking your money.”

 

“They’re really good, Daisy,” Jemma interrupts, eyes wide.

 

Changing the focus of attention seems like her best course of action, too many prickly wide eyes all expecting far too much from her.

“We ran into a little trouble, May,” she says, “can we stick around back here a while?”

“As long as you need,” she answers with a nod, lips twitching a little.  “I’ll be around – lots to get done.”

Daisy smiles her thanks as her friend glances at the kids behind her a final time before disappearing back through the curtains.

“Was that Melinda May?” Jemma asks as soon as she is out of sight, attention successfully averted off of the soft scenes surrounding them.  “Doesn’t she own a theater?”

“This theater,” Daisy confirms, glancing around the comforting space as she considers where to set the sibling up for the next hours -- at least until Snyder has certainly left the area.  “It’ll probably be best up on the catwalk,” she finally decides, motioning back towards the ladder. “You can watch the show for free and everything.”

xx

She catches sight of the blonde hair without even really seeing him, but she knows it is him by the messy locks regardless – up in one of the side boxes across from the catwalk.  She can’t get a full look at him from the spot, not really – and she mumbles an excuse to Jemma before she scuttles back down the ladder and into the wing opposite the box he is in, peering up at the focused eyes beneath the familiar golden sheen of his hair. It shines differently in the faux daylight of the theater, less bright and sunny – but still transfixing and foreign – it is a color she can imagine herself mixing paints for hours to try to pin down and still failing, as she has so often tried to capture the sun.

“Who’s that?” She asks May when she passes by practically on cue a moment later, nodding up at the box where he still sits, watching the show unfalteringly.

She feels her friend’s gaze on her, sizing her up, but she answers after only a moment.

“He’s a reporter.  I’ve never seen him around before, he must be new to the game,” she pauses, glancing away from him to study Daisy’s expression a moment longer. “The door to the box is open.”

Daisy shoots her a look that she returns in the form of a knowing wink before turning back off in a different direction – endless work to be done around her theater.

She stares up at him a moment longer before making her decision, slipping back behind the stage and hurrying to reach behind one of the sets she has been painting for a spare piece of crumbling charcoal and an old program.  She shoves them into her back pocket before slipping into the other wing up the stairs to the box, letting herself in without a knock.

“This is a private box,” he says when he hears the door, not looking away from the show going on beneath them – light eyes narrowed and entranced as they dart between the notebook he is scribbling in and the stage.

She smiles a little in spite of herself.

“You want me to lock the door?” she offers lazily, motioning towards it even though he still hasn’t looked up at her.

After she speaks, though, distraction fogs his expression and he peers up – and she could swear recognition crosses through those eyes of his.

She decides to gamble on it.

“Twice in one day,” she says, still smiling lightly. “I’d say that’s fate, wouldn’t you?”

His throat bobs above a swallow, and he tears his eyes off of her.

“I’m working.”

She lets him refocus his attention on the stage and his quick scribbles, because she likes how focus looks on him – deliberate and etched lines that are made to fit into his face.

“Working,” she murmurs after a moment anyway, testing the word on her tongue… missing his eyes on her. “A working guy. Huh. I don’t hang around many guys with real jobs. What  _ is _ your job?”

She is beginning to wear on his nerves, talking over every other line of the show – she can see it in the little clench of his jaw, and she is suddenly very interested in how his pretty face might look thoroughly frustrated. 

For  _ completely _ innocent reasons, of course.

“I’m writing a review for the Sun,” he tells her, “of this show. Which is really difficult to do when I’m not actually  _ hearing _ the show.”

“You work for the Sun?” She says, taking a small step nearer to him and efficiently ignoring his hint about not hearing the show, “I work for the World.”

She  _ does _ , sort of.

“I’m sure there are plenty of people in this theater who would love to hear all about that,” he mutters under his breath, frustration making a gentle reappearance in a trio of wrinkles cracking across his forehead as his eyes drift annoyed back up at her. “Go tell  _ them _ .”

She likes his blunt way of talking, likes how it gently contrasts the clear kindness in his eyes – likes what an enigma he is.  She shifts a bit so she is leaning on the railing facing him, crossing her arms and watching the deep focus set back into his face.

“The view is better up here,” she tells him, keeping her smile contained but waggling her brows when he sighs loudly, peering up at her through his heavy lashes.

“Do you make a habit of talking to strangers?” he asks, dropping his pencil defeatedly onto his notebook and crossing his arms as he stares fully at her. “Because I don’t.”

She hold his stare steadily for a moment, reveling in the odd mix of intrigue and frustration behind his eyes before speaking.

“Then you’re going to make a pretty lousy reporter, aren’t you?”

He opens his mouth to snap back at her but clearly comes up empty, instead settling on narrowing his eyes at her before turning back to the show.

She moves back towards the door, situating herself against it as she pulls the paper and charcoal from her back pocket, watching his face for a moment with the same attention he is giving the show, memorizing the way the different contrasting lines curve – before starting to scribble over the words on the old program.

It isn’t as if she hasn’t been with plenty of guys – it is more that she has never particularly been a fan of the soft kind of love Fitz talks about, the “true” love and the love “at first sight” and all the poetic variations of the basic human instinct to be attracted to other humans.  She has never quite been able to convince herself attraction is anything more than simply  _ attraction _ . 

She isn’t sure how the way the light shines off of him makes her question absolutely all of it.

He glances at her as she works now, unable to maintain the same attention to the stage he had before she had interrupted, and she tries not to let it show in her face how much the sideways glances make her heart thud.  Finally he sighs his defeat, looking between her and the program she is scribbling on.

“What are you  _ doing _ ?” He asks.

She squints at him a moment, and adds another shadow to the page before moving to respond.

“Working,” she answers mockingly after a breath. Then she nods at the stage, trying not to smirk as she adds an air of faux authority to her tone, “Quiet down, there’s a show going on.”

His eyebrows shoot up immediately and she can’t fight back her smile any more after finally successfully drawing a full expression of frustration out of him.

“You are the most  _ impossible _ girl--” he informs her gruffly.

“Shhh,” she interrupts, a chalk-darkened finger held to her lips.

“ _ Ever _ ,” he finishes under his breath.

(She isn’t sure, but she thinks a tiny smile might fight at his own lips as he draws his eyes off of her, shaking his head.)

She shades one final bit of her drawing, holding it up to compare it to its muse before she is content – dropping it on an empty seat and allowing herself one more long look at him before slipping silently backwards out the door.

She is  _ screwed _ .

xx

She runs a few beats behind the boys the next morning, limbs still aching from the hard chase the night before – and they are in a complete uproar when she arrives, yelling back and forth.  No one has bothered to begin to gather into the line for papers, or gather in any way at all except in an angrily churning mob.  She tries to seek out Fitz but the moment one of them spots her the lot of them are all crowding her at once, all talking over one another and making it impossible for her to decipher what the hell is actually going on.

“Everyone stick a sock in it,” she finally calls loudly over the overlapping voices, pushing past a few of the boys to Fitz. “What the hell?”

He doesn’t speak – instead nodding up at the chalkboard she hasn’t had a moment to look up at to check the new headline.  She follows his movement now, squinting up at the words.

**_NEW NEWSIE PRICE: 60 CENTS PER 100_ **

She does a double take, reading the letters carefully three times before looking beside her at Fitz for confirmation.

“I coul’ barely afford th’ price as they were.  We’re all going t’ be living on the streets,” he says sadly.

“Fitz, we already live on the streets.”

“In a  _ worse neighborhood _ .”

She shakes her head, too exhausted to pretend his odd brand of nervous humor is funny – instead rubbing at her burning eyes as she turns back to the other boys who have stayed silent, awaiting her cue.

“Relax, it’s gotta be a gag, boys,” she says, “Weasel is pulling a fast one on us.”

There is an echoing murmur of agreement as she passes again through the ranks, pulling her coin from her pocket as she approaches Wiesel.

“Real good one,” she tells him dryly. “You really had the fellas going.” She drops the coin in his outstretched palm. “Give me the usual.”

He stares at the coin in his hand and looks slowly back up at her, far too much enjoyment built up into his twitchy smile.

“A hundred will cost you sixty,” he says, staring at her unblinkingly as he crosses his arms.

The buzz starts up anxiously behind her again as she stares back, unflinching.

“I’m not paying sixty,” she tells him stubbornly, hoping her uneasiness doesn’t come across in her tone as she glances again up at the headline plastered above them.

The filthy smile sticks across his face and he speaks slowly and meticulously.

“Then make way for someone who  _ will _ .”

She shakes her head, reeling from the words and racking for a quick idea as she grabs her coin back from his greasy hand, glancing over her shoulder at the line of boys still waiting for her move.

“Fine,” she mutters gruffly, stepping away from the counter and back towards the shining World gates, settling on a plan of action and making a show of shoving her money back into her pocket. “I guess me and the guys are gonna take our business to the Journal.”

There is another murmur of agreement as they move to follow her, but she nearly runs into Hunter as he is hurrying back through the gates towards her.

“I’ll save you the walk, love – they’ve upped the prices, too.”

She swallows, a new sort of anxiety settling into the pit of her stomach at her friend’s breathless words.

“Then we’ll go to the Sun,” she says, but her voice shakes and Wiesel speaks up.

“The prices are up all around town, darling,” he says smugly. “New day, new price. So are you buyin’, or movin’ on?”

Daisy stares him down again, longer this time as the wheels turn anxiously in her mind. 

A dime is two days of eating –  _ two days _ .  None of the boys can afford to lose that sort of money and neither can she.

She draws away when she thinks the fear might be beginning to show in her expression – the eyes of all the boys pricking on her skin.

“Hey, everyone come here,” she mutters, crowding towards a wagon as the boys close in around her and sinking uneasily onto a stack of papers to hide the quivering of her knees beneath the pressure.

“They can’t just do this,” one of them mutters fearfully.

“It’s their paper, it’s their right,” says another.

She swallows as the voices raise around her.

“Quiet!” she finally yells over the voices, clenching white knuckled fists at her sides. “Would you all just keep your shirts on and let me think this through!?”

Suddenly little Les seems to pop up out of nowhere between her and the horde of boys.

“Stop crowding her!” he orders, his small voice surprisingly demanding as he shoves the older boys back from where she is sat. “Let the woman work it out!”

He earns her another moment of uneasy silence and she rubs at the bridge of her nose as she searches for anything, any options or answers – but is terrified to continue to come up empty.  She doesn’t know enough about  _ any _ of it – their rights, the paper, or who is in charge. She doesn’t have any sort of baseline on which to stand, nowhere to start brainstorming a way of fixing what Pulitzer has broken.

She breathes in slowly, trying to fill the emptiness with  _ something _ .

She has no way of working it out.

“Hey Daisy… you still thinkin?” Les asks after a moment, taking a hesitant step back towards her. 

“Sure she is,” Romeo confirms, “Dontcha smell the smoke?”

She scowls at him, throwing up her middle finger in his general direction – which only seems to amuse him.  When the other boys remain standing by uneasily, his laughter slowly dies out.

She frantically delves into a different approach.  The immediate problem is clear.   _ They can’t buy the papers. _

They can’t buy the papers.

She runs an anxious hand through her hair, clenching her jaw tight as the realization hits her hard. 

“Alright,” she mutters, “Alright, everyone come over here.”

Their faces turn hesitantly hopeful at the confirmation of a plan, and she bites at her lip as they crowd back around her.

“If we don’t sell the papes, the papes don’t get sold,” she says slowly, and the boys confirm the sentiment with a few scattered nods. 

“So… we  _ don’t _ sell the papes.  Not one, not any of us – not till they bring the price back down.”

Her words are answered with an anxious buzz.

“Do you mean like a strike?” Jemma asks from somewhere behind the boys, and Daisy considers it for a moment, thinking of the trolley workers and the week after week headlines they made, the buzz they built up through the city.

“Yeah,” she confirms, nodding slowly. “Yeah, you all heard her.  We’re going on strike.”

The response is mixed.

“Half of the trolley workers is laid up in the hospital,” Alfred calls out uneasily, “the cops beat up on them.”

“The cops aren’t going to care about a bunch of kids,” Daisy says, even though she has no idea – but she seeks out Jemma through the faces for confirmation. “Tell them.”

The other girl’s eyes have gone wide and doey, and she shakes her head slowly, reaching for Les and drawing him out away from the other boys.

“Leave me out of this,” she pleads, “I’m just here trying to feed my family.”

The words hit Daisy hard, fiery anger pulsing through her veins as she scurries back up to stand on top of her seat of papers so she can see the other girl over the heads.

“You think the rest of us are here for kicks!?” She asks with a furrowed brow and a raised tone, staring her right in the eyes.  She turns away from her and Daisy jumps angrily down, pushing through the boys to grab her upper arm until she snaps back around to face her. “ _ Hey _ . Just because we only make pennies, doesn’t give anyone the right to rub our noses in it!”

“It doesn’t matter!” Jemma speaks up over her loud tone, shaking her head hard. “You  _ can’t _ strike, you aren’t a union.”

It gives her a moment’s pause.

“Well what if I say we are?” She challenges icily, scowl deepening when Jemma’s expression hardens stubbornly.

“There is quite a bit you’ve got to have to be a union,” she answers, not backing down from even Daisy’s hardest stare.

It only makes her grow more frustrated.

“Like what?”

“Like  _ membership _ .”

“What do you call these guys!?” She asks, pointing behind her at the troupe of boys watching the confrontation go down like it is good theater.

Jemma shocks Daisy by not arguing with her, and instead sighing defeatedly as she hangs her head back momentarily, eyes pressed closed.  Then she looks back at her.

“You’ll need officers,” she says, change in demeanor impossible to miss.

There is the creak of Fitz’s crutch behind her as he limps forward. She glances over her shoulder and he smiles reassuringly.

“I nominate Daisy as president,” he says, loud enough for all the boys to hear, and an affirming sound of agreement echoes through them.

She isn’t sure whether she should be honored by or fearful of the faith the boys have in her – she isn’t keen on the risk that she might be the one who lets them down.

She takes a small step back so she is even with Fitz, glancing back to Jemma for the next order of business.

“What’ll be your statement of purpose?” she prompts, the words all foreign to Daisy’s ears.  Luckily, one of the boys speaks out before she has to.

“The hell is a statement of purpose!?”

“It is the reason you have for forming a union,” Jemma defines easily, but doesn’t look at the boy – still staring at Daisy.

She is thinking about the trolley workers again, the front page stories under her nose for weeks on end.

“Fair wages, yeah?” she says slowly, looking up from her feet as she recalls words, “Safety? Job security?”

The fellas continue to murmur their agreement behind her, and she nods her own affirmation of what she’s just claimed, looking expectantly at Jemma for guidance into the next challenge.

“Well,” a pause. “if you want to strike, you’ll have to put it to a vote.”

She doesn’t have to ask the question to know the answer, but it is a formality nonetheless and she turns back to the boys, hopping through the crowd to jump back up on her stack of papers and feeling every eye follow her.

“What do you say, fellas?” She asks, raising her voice to be heard clearly in every ear. “Do we let Pulitzer push us around, or do we strike?”

There is no hesitation in the loud, united response.

“Strike!”

She looks at Jemma, and the boys, catching on, do too.

“Now?” Daisy prompts.

“Now?” Jemma repeats thoughtfully, shaking her head. “I guess the strike would be more effective if someone in charge knew about it.”

“How do we do that!?” Fitz asks.

“Someone’s gotta tell Pulitzer,” Hunter realizes out loud.

Daisy is sure she knows who someone is, but she stares expectantly at Jemma anyway.

“I think… I think you would be the one who tells him,” she says, and pauses before giving in a bit to the excited buzz around them – smiling and adding, “ _ President _ .”

“C’mere,” Daisy holds out a hand, urging a still slightly reluctant Jemma closer to her through the boys. “What do I tell him?”

The boys stare at Jemma, and she swallows as she looks out around them.

“Well I suppose you tell him that he’s got to respect your rights as employees,” she says to the expectant faces before glancing back at Daisy for approval.  She nods, and Jemma’s voice grows stronger, feeding on the growing energy around them. “Tell them that they can’t just change the rules whenever they feel like it.”

“We do the work, so we get a say,” Daisy adds.

When Jemma looks at her again, there is  _ almost _ excitement in her eyes.

“We’ve got a union,” she tells her, and a charged muttering travels through the boys at the confirmation.

Daisy stares over the crowd at the headline board they’re trying to make, mind whirring as she leaps back down from the stacks and makes a beeline for the ladder up.  She scurries to the top quickly, staring up smugly at the perfect view every window in Pulitzer tower has of the board – before scanning the platform for a piece of chalk and puzzling for a moment over what to do when she comes up empty.

Then she remembers the charcoal still pressed in her back pocket.

She snatches it out, lifting herself precariously onto the railing so she can scribble the large black letters right on top of the white ones already there.

**_STRIKE_ **

Her writing is sloppy but the message is clear.


	3. Divided We Fall

Jemma falls back into the slow pace Fitz and Daisy keep at the end of the trekking boys, still bouncing with the excited energy that fed them earlier.  They had stayed outside the shining _World_ gate until the sky started to burn dusky orange -- at Jemma’s suggestion, of course – to make certain that no one was called in to sell the papers themselves.  No one had turned up – and the extent of what that meant was difficult for Daisy’s limited scope to fathom.  She had made a choice, and the entirety of Lower Manhattan was affected as a result of it.

What they are doing is as big as Daisy’s world.

“Tomorrow they’ll call in scabs,” Jemma tells her softly enough that only Fitz, poised at her other side, can hear, her tone taking on a disgusted edge.  “They’ll try to replace us just like they tried to replace the Trolley workers.”

Daisy nods, remembering the headlines.

“We won’t let it happen.  We’ll go back, as long as we have to.  The fellas know you’ve got smarts, they’ll do whatever you say we’ve gotta.”

She bites nervously at her lower lip as the boys in front of them turn off the road, into Jacobi’s – the only restaurant in the entire borough that doesn’t kick them out every time they walk in.

“If that’s the case, Daisy –“ she stops, touching Daisy’s wrist to motion for her to do the same as the last of the boys slip through the door.  

She does, turning slightly to face the other girl and motioning with her head for Fitz to go on ahead without her. Jemma continues after a moment, eyes on Fitz limping through the door before flicking anxiously back to Daisy.

“If we want this to work, to really be successful – I think we need to expand the scope.  Lower Manhattan didn’t get their news today and that is a _big_ start – but the _World_ is still making sales in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Uptown – Lower Manhattan is just a dent.  It isn’t enough.”

Daisy considers her words a moment.

“You think we need to get the other Newsies in on the strike?” she clarifies, speaking carefully.

Jemma nods, and after a breath, Daisy does too.

“We can do that.  I’ll send boys out to each of the boroughs, they can talk to the guys in charge.  They’ll help, I know they will.”

Jemma looks less certain, but says nothing.  And Daisy knows, understands how much this would be asking of the other kids.  But they are in it all together – she and her boys are fighting for all of them, and she can’t imagine the others won’t be willing to join in their fight.

She swallows uneasily anyway before moving towards the doors of the restaurant, Jemma in her wake.

“Hey,” she calls over the loud voices as the doors close hard behind her – peering over the tables they’ve crowded together and one very tired Mr. Jacobi pinching the bridge of his nose, “hey, Jemma’s got another idea for us, everyone listen up!”

She motions sideways at Jemma, inviting her to reiterate the words to the boys – mostly because she is pretty sure she will bang the concept up beyond repair if she attempts to pass it on herself.  The other girl has got far better control of her tongue, and Daisy doesn’t want to risk what they are doing over a few jumbled letters.

She expects Jemma to be glaring at her for making her the center of the group’s unwavering attention, per her usual shy tendencies, but when she takes a seat with the others and looks at her friend, she is surprised to find a focused, passionate glow in her eyes.

“We need to send the word out to the other Newsies,” she tells them, voice breaking uneasily but growing in strength, adapting to the position of leadership Daisy has pushed her into.  “Get them to join in the strike.  We stopped the circulation in Lower Manhattan today but we didn’t stop the wagons, and the most certain way to do that is the most simple – let the wagons go, and get the rest of the boys ‘round the city not to purchase their papers from them.”

The boys react with the same anxious edge Daisy had felt when Jemma first passed the pan on, nervous murmurs going through them – just as she expects.  She takes the cue, rising back to her feet and joining Jemma up in front of them.

“We made up this union because we are stronger together, yeah?” She prompts, waiting for the slow nods of confirmation before continuing.  “The more of us stand as one, the harder it’ll be to pull us down.  Yeah, Jemma?”

Her affirmation of the newbie’s idea doesn’t fully satisfy the boys, but it quells their unease enough.

“We need t’ split up,” says Fitz after a moment, uneasiness still in his eyes but taking Daisy’s back, as usual – staring at her before glancing out over the boys.  “Someone needs t’ take each borough, talk t’ th’ guys in charge ‘n tell ‘em wha’ we’re tryin’ t’ do.”

Jemma visibly relaxes at the added backup, eyes clinging softly to Fitz as he takes control, leaning up onto his crutch.

“Hunter, take Specs ‘n head uptown ‘n see Trip,” he nods, and continues down the table of boys, assigning boroughs as those remaining grow increasingly twitchy. Finally, the penny drops – “’n tha’ leaves Romeo wi’ Brooklyn – Morse’s turf.”

Romeo immediately is shaking his head, hard.

“Uh uh, I ain’t messing with Brooklyn.  Send me anywhere else, not there.”

Fitz begins to argue with him but Daisy speaks faster.

“You aren’t scared of Brooklyn, are you Romeo?”

She isn’t sure whether or not she expects the tactic to work, but she thinks it might when he jumps defensively to his feet at her words, face contorting in a sort of angry offense.

“I ain’t scared of no turf, Johnson,” he snaps, holding her stare steadily for a moment before his expression cracks ever so slightly and he sinks slowly back into his seat. “Look but Morse, she gets me a little jittery, alright?”

She tries a new plan, rolling her eyes as she does.

“Fine, Jemma and Les will take Brooklyn.”

Jemma looks at her like she has just grown a second nose, all of the previous brawn melted away.

“Excuse me?”

 

“She’ll go easy on a fresh face,” Daisy lies, probably concerningly easily.  “Besides, you talk best outta all of us.  She’ll listen to what you’ve gotta say.”

Jemma looks ready to say plenty more about it, but she is interrupted by the creak of Jacobi’s door and the gaping mouths of the boys who can see who is entering in behind them.  Daisy turns slowly to follow their combined gazes, stomach flipping nervously as her mind flutters around what possible outsider could possibly be causing such a unified reaction.

“What’s so bad about Brooklyn?”

It’s the blonde reporter, typical pencil and notebook extensions to his hands.

Daisy has to bite back her own gape, situating her face into something that might resemble disinterest.

“I thought you didn’t talk to strangers?” She says before any of the boys can speak up to answer him, taking a half a step towards him and still trying to balance his odd presence out in the grey surroundings that just aren’t meant for someone like him – not with his clean skin and his bright hair and his ironed clothes.

Seeing him in the streets they share, in the theater that isn’t hers – those are things that she can adjust to, places that his presence fits easily into.  But it is only in the greyscale of this place that is all _hers_ that she realizes that even though he might see through the veil, he is still very much a part of the parallel universe that lives in bright pastels above their little underground world.

The thought isn’t entirely welcome in her mind, but she nails it firmly into place.

“We’re not strangers anymore,” he says deadpan, but his light eyes twinkle playfully. “We saw a show together last night, didn’t we?”

She squints at him distrustfully, suddenly less of a fan of the unpredictability that she is having trouble muddling through.  She decides two can play the game he is initiating.

“For a _Sun_ reporter, you spend an awful lotta time around the _World_ ,” she muses confidently. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were following me.”

The boys back her up with a smattering of nervous laughter as she smirks.

He rolls his eyes, but they are still twinkling in spite of the dig.

“Just following a story,” he assures her.  “Daisy – it is Daisy, right? Why do none of you want to go to Brooklyn?”

She looks at the notebook in his hand, pencil poised readily over blank pages – and remembers how week after week the trolley worker’s strike was headlined in bold on the papes she waves around every day.

“Brooklyn is the 6th largest city in the world,” she says carefully after a long pause, watching his expression closely as his focus shifts to the paper he is suddenly scribbling on, “if they’ve got our backs, Pulitzer will have no choice but to listen to what we’ve got to say.”

He looks up after a moment, but his eyes are on Hunter instead of Daisy this time.

“Is that how you’re planning on getting them to give the time of day to a bunch of kids without a nickel to their names?” He asks in a practiced tone, and Hunter looks offended.

“Oi, you don’t gotta be insulting!” he says, and lowers his voice conspiratorially as he reaches deep into his pocket, “I’ve _got_ a nickel.”

He is still scribbling, and she tries to fight the feeling of entrancement that edges at her when his face hardens in intelligent concentration.

“So I guess you could say you’re a bunch of David’s looking to take on Goliath?” He says under his breath, peering up at Daisy through his lashes a moment before snapping his attention back to his feverish scribbling.

It is then that Daisy feels the angry shift of Jemma beside her, stepping up to the reporter with arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“Hey, we never said that,” she tells him defensively, eyes narrow with suspicion.  “And quite frankly, I think that we ought to save this exclusive for a reporter who actually has a column.”

It is his turn to look royally offended, brows furrowing heavily over his light eyes.

Daisy catches quickly on to the weakness.

“You know, I’ve seen a lotta papers in my time,” she agrees, “I have never seen a kid our age writing hard news.”

He finally stares back at her, scowling defiantly – and _god_ , somehow this expression is a perfect match to his careful face, too.

“The game is changing,” he says, looking between Daisy and Jemma – but his cheeks are burning red.  Daisy joins Jemma, crossing her arms stubbornly over her chest and staring him down.

“What’s the last news story you wrote?” She challenges, taking a small step closer to him – not entirely sure whether her need to one-up him is fully related to the cause or not.

She thinks, _probably_ , not.

He doesn’t sway from the challenge, instead taking his own defensive step nearer to her, glaring down at her with squared shoulders.

“What is the last strike _you_ organized?”

His voice is steady and clear, and they stand there a moment glaring at each other while the boys “ooh” traitorously at his quick response.

After a moment of letting his point sink in, he speaks again, leaning down nearer to her as he lowers his voice.

“You see anyone else giving you the time of day?” He asks, eyes suddenly soft and honest, voice almost pleading. “Look, maybe I _am_ just busting out of the socials. But give me this exclusive, let me run with this story – and I _will_ get you the space.”

“Wait,” Romeo says from somewhere on Daisy’s left that she isn’t entirely aware of, too busy trying to add the boy in front of her up. “You could get us in the pape?”

He steps back from her, looking to Romeo – and the spell snaps as she clears her throat and tightens her arms across her chest, making her own step back.

“You stop a paper like the _World_ ,” he tells him with that same special brand of soft genuine honesty, “and you will make the _front page_.”

Silence answers his words, and Daisy glances sideways at Jemma – who still doesn’t look entirely convinced.  But her shoulders have relaxed and she at least has let her guard down, if only barely.

Daisy isn’t sure if the decision is the right one, but she does think that it might just be worth the risk.

That _he_ might just be worth the risk.

“You want a story?” She says, filling the tentative space left between them as he turns to face her, eyes wide and receptive. “Be at the World gates tomorrow morning and you’ll get one.”

xx

He hangs around as the other boys and Jemma disperse out in the directions of the various boroughs, following Daisy as she walks out the door – pen and paper back in hand from his pocket.

“Now you really are following me,” she notes, stopping when they reach the corner of the Deli to turn around and grin at him.

She is oddly relieved at the soft way he smiles back.

“I wanted to ask you some questions,” he says, and she returns his eye roll.

“A likely story, Mr. Still Nameless _Reporter_.”

She smirks fully as he joins her leaning up against the wall, pressing a cheek to the ice cold brick and staring down at her.

“Lincoln,” he answers the unspoken question. “Lincoln… Campbell.”

He hesitates oddly on his last name, and Daisy can’t help but wrinkle her nose at him.

“What, aren’t you sure?” She asks, pressing her own cheek to the wall in an attempt to find the appeal.

It is goddamn cold, and she pulls her face straight back upright.

“It’s my byline,” he answers, surprising her when he raises a hand, brushing warm fingers across the still-numb bit of her cheek.  “The name I publish under.”

“I _know_ what a byline is,” she lies as he drops his hand back to his side quickly, like he almost didn’t realize what he was doing.

A moment later he lifts his own head back up off of the wall, one cheek burned asymmetrically red – glancing down at his little notebook before meeting her gaze again.

“So what is your story, Daisy Johnson?” he asks, pronouncing her name deliberately against all his other soft and careful words.

She likes how he says her name, like how the boys say it when they are bragging about her mythos or trying to talk up her talents.  She likes that he doesn’t know any of it and still says her name like it is the name of someone important, someone bigger than she is.

She forgets to answer, and it makes him smile again.

“Are you selling newspapers to work your way through art school?” He follows up with genuine curiosity.

The question catches her entirely off guard, and she can’t swallow the nervous chuckle that rises up the back of her throat at the odd assertion. His expression doesn’t change, however, and she finally shakes her head slowly.

“No, Campbell,” she says, “I am definitely not in art school.”

He scribbles her unexceptional words.

“Well you’re an artist,” he says as he writes, sparing her a quick glance up from the page, eyebrows knotted seriously.  “That drawing you did last night… you should be inside the paper illustrating it, not out selling it.”

She stares dubiously back at him as he finishes scribbling down whatever it is he has managed to find interesting, beginning to feel the edge of defensiveness bite at the pit of her stomach.

“Well maybe that’s not what I _want_ ,” she retaliates, shifting on the wall and coming inadvertently closer to him when she does.  He is warm – they are close but not _that_ close, but she can still feel heat gathering between them.  And his _eyes_ , she thinks, are the color of the sky, the real sky behind all the layers of smoke and smog and dust in the city.

“Then tell me what it is you _want_ ,” he says, nearly pleading, probably desperate for anything even remotely interesting about a girl she feels certain he has overestimated.

She can’t help it – she waggles her eyebrows a bit, scanning his body briefly with her eyes alone.

“Can’t you tell?”

He blinks, unamused, and as she smirks back at his blank expression, she notes how his cheeks are now a matching shade of pink.

“Have you always been their leader?” He quickly changes the topic, staring hard at his notebook and very pointedly not at her.

She scoffs again, and he sighs loudly in response to the reaction -- enough to make her feel badly and search for a halfway-decent response.

“I’m not even particularly a leader now.  Just a figurehead, really.  Jemma is the brains.”

“Modesty is _not_ a trait I expected in you,” he muses under his breath, and it makes her smile grow because of the mere fact that he was expecting something of her, has thought of her beyond their two terribly brief encounters.  She doesn’t say anything about it. “Tell me about tomorrow,” he goes on, “what are you hoping for?”

“Let’s go back to what I’m hoping for tonight,” she teases, because she is pretty sure it will make him go pink again – and he does.

 

She likes being the cause behind the subtle shifts in his carefully composed expressions, likes that that composure seems to slip, if only slightly, in her presence.

 

This time he scavenges together enough wits to glare at her.

“You are completely incapable of being professional, aren’t you?”

She grins, but thinks again for a serious answer, something to help him and help her strike -- something to get them heard.

“Today we stopped the local Newsies from selling the papes.  Tomorrow we stop the wagons so that the papes don’t get sold anywhere in the city.”

Relief washes over his face and he hurries to record her words, moving his hand like he is afraid they will slip away if he doesn’t trap them down quickly enough.

“Are you scared?” He asks, a single line forming across his forehead in the second unfamiliar showing of concern she has been on the receiving end of in the previous days.

She shrugs, turning off the wall and slightly away from where he stands, away from the pressure the cautiousness of his eyes pushes against her.  If she is honest with herself – which she generally isn’t – her heart hasn’t quite slowed its frantic pulsing against her chest since she read the headline in the afternoon.

She is sure as _hell_ scared.

“Ask me again in the morning.”

 

His pencil stills for a moment, and she can still feel his eyes on her.

“That’s a good answer,” he notes softly, before lead scrapes on paper a final time and she hears the notebook flip closed. “Goodnight, Miss Johnson.”

She hears him take a step and whirls around, forgetting whatever pretense she is supposed to be holding up.

“Hey, where are you off to? It isn’t even dinner yet!”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he says past a soft and reassuring smile over his shoulder. “And off the record… Good luck, Daisy.”

She watches him stride away from her a stretching moment longer before calling after him.

“Hey, Campbell!” She yells, waiting for him to glance back at her before she continues, softer but still with enough force to be heard. “Write it good.  We’ve all got a lot counting on you.”

xx

Brooklyn is not waiting for them at the front gates of the _World_ when they gather uneasily around it as the city wakes up – and neither are any of the other Newsies of New York.

“Is anyone else comin’?”

“Midtown said they’d be here, if Brooklyn was.”

“Harlem too.”

“Queens’ll be right here backin’ us up.  As… soon as they get the nod from Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn… they want proof, Daisy.  They want to know that we aren’t going to crumble under the first wave of pressure before they commit themselves.”

Daisy looks around the crestfallen frowns of the small group of boys – and she can see the resolve cracking, the excited energy of the morning before beginning to grow heavy in the face of reality, in the face of days without pay, the prospective debilitating, aching hunger they are all on far too close of a first name basis with.

It is just them, still.  Their little family standing all on their own.

She can see in their eyes that they are debating their options, see the matching trend through all of their somber, dirty faces.  They want to quit.  They want to walk up to the circulation window, put up the extra money and pretend they aren’t sulking off with their tails between their legs.

She isn’t sure she is entirely opposed to the thought, herself.

“Maybe we oughtta put it off for a day,” Spec murmurs uneasily, shifting his bag on his shoulders.

Daisy isn’t surprised by the soft and hesitant noises of agreement that follow.

She is surprised by the adamant “No!” that sounds from Jemma, however. Every eye turns onto her with shock equivalent to what Daisy feels, and the other girl’s cheeks burn slightly pink against the attention, her own wide eyes staring back at each of the boys in turn.

“We can’t back off now,” she says, voice softer as she shakes her head. “We _can’t_.  We back off now, they’ll never take us seriously again.  Not one of us can go up to that window.”

This time, however, her clever words aren’t quite enough.

Hunter shakes his head, watching her sadly.

“Whatever we do isn’t going to make a difference,” he says, defeated.  “We don’t have any backup.  We can’t do this on our own.”

Jemma looks to Daisy, eyes pleading for her support – but her tongue is dry and her brain too sluggish to draw anything of any real meaning together.

“We should listen to Jemma,” she manages halfheartedly – and it only leads more boys to shaking their heads, drifting back from the little group looking conflicted, debating their impossible duo of options.

It is falling apart, and she glances nervously back at Jemma, sharing her desperate gaze and trying to ignore how the air seems to thin around her at the prospect of failure.  Of giving in.

“Sounds like we got some bum information about a strike happening here today,” calls one of the Delancey’s in a sing-songy tone as they approach the gate from inside, jangling keys sounding somehow like mockery.

No one talks back.

“How unfortunate,” says the other in the same showy tone as his brother, as he comes straight up to where Daisy stands alone against the gate, the others all backed up to make way for it to open. “I was looking forward to smashing some of your boys’ heads today.”

She shoves the locked gate inwards in a flare of frustration, but doesn’t even draw comfort from the startled manner in which he jumps back from the clanging metal before scowling at her and moving to unlock it, slow and deliberate.

He doesn’t bother to open it or fight with her about moving out of his way, instead stalking back towards the wagons with his brother and leaving them alone at the unlocked gate.

She hears the small group of boys shifting anxiously behind her but she doesn’t move, staring after the Delancey’s and searching for the smallest ounce of motivation, the tiniest spark she might be able to gather enough strength to fan into a flame.

She is tired.

“Daisy,” Romeo says gently, “maybe we should just put this off’a few days.”

She doesn’t answer, but feels someone come up beside her – prodding her shoulder _hard_.

“You have to say something,” Jemma hisses under her breath. “Daisy, they’ll listen to what you tell them but you _have_ to tell them _something_.”

She shakes her head, staring out at where the wagons are just beginning to be filled with the papers that’ll be circulated out to the rest of New York, regardless of what they do today.

“What the hell can I say?” She answers, only making a halfhearted attempt to match the lowered tone.

The boys anxious murmurs are heightening in volume.

“How about we jus’ don’t show up for work?” Fitz suggests, “That’d send th’ message.”

Daisy lets out a frustrated breath, turning away from the fence and the papers and Jemma to face the growing discourse.

“They’ll just bring in scabs to replace us, Fitz,” she says, voice snapping slightly beneath the weight of her words. “We have to stand our ground.”

The words don’t affect the changing temperament, and she feels herself giving up, giving into the pressure fighting against them.

She looks back at Jemma.

“Tell them,” she says, voice breaking fully now as she steps back up to the gate, ignoring Jemma’s noise of frustration.

There is a moment of hesitation, silence – and Daisy realizes with a bit of a start that the boys have quieted, waiting to hear what Jemma will say.

Jemma realizes it too, filling the silence with an uncomfortable clearing of her throat as she shifts back towards them, away from the gate.

“We’re all scared,” she says quietly. “But you boys are here.  You came here to fight for yourselves, for your rights – yeah? And the rights of the boys all around town who aren’t here, you’re standing by them anyway.  And… that is _brave_.”

She pauses on the word – surely knowing the impact it will have on the assortment of street kids.  Surely knowing how weighty it is, this application of the word to these boys who have so rarely been given affirmation by anyone in their lives.

But the _use_ of the word isn’t entirely what strikes Daisy.

It is the truth that it wields.

“Being brave isn’t about not being scared,” Jemma continues, voice still quiet but gaining a new sense of drive, a new purpose.  “But it _is_ about going through with what frightens you in spite of your fear.  We’re fighting for something and if we want to win, we have to carry through.  We _have to_. And we have to do it today.”

Another pause answered with still, stretching silence.

It is Fitz that breaks it.

“I made a banner, las’ night,” he says, voice only just louder than Jemma’s – and Daisy finds herself glancing over her shoulder as he lifts his crutch to show off the tiny white flag he has secured to it made from a cloth from his bed – “STRIKE” sloppily written across it in a piece of her charcoal.  He is smiling a little, shyly, eyes on Jemma.

It breaks the spell her words have cast over them, and when quiet murmurs fill their little circle again, the tone has changed entirely.

“That is pitiful,” Hunter tells Fitz, who seems unphased by the blatant assertion.

“Don’t be so quick to judge!” Les scolds, little voice standing out from the rest. “Maybe Pulitzer’ll see it out his window and feel sorry for us!”

Daisy finally draws herself from the fence, stepping back up beside Jemma as she studies each of the boys faces in turn.  They are still anxious, still jittery – but they are back with them.

She is careful to let the breath of relief out of her nose quietly, out of sight and sound.

“Everyone in?” She asks over their quiet noise, drawing their attention easily with the snap of two words.

They nod slowly.

The anxiety tangling and knotting in the pit of her stomach is worse than ever before, every eye watching her expectantly for their next move.  She can’t shake the feeling that she is still leading them into failure.  A chill that has nothing to do with the cold air hurries down her spine and through her arms, and she has to clench her teeth to keep it from showing.

Jemma is right.  She is _terrified_.

“Then let’s go stop some wagons.”

xx

The scabs push through them to get to the gate when they arrive, and Daisy has to physically hold back Romeo and Albert when the three replacements drop their coins in Weasel’s waiting hand and grab their papers – most of the other boys are joining the growling anger at the intruders as well.

“We stand together or we _don’t stand at all,_ ” Jemma reminds Daisy anxiously over the ruckus, nervousness clear in the wringing of her hands.

Fitz catches on as quickly as Daisy does, placing himself pointedly between the strikers and the scabs who have cowered away in fright from their angry advances.

“I hear you,” Daisy assures Jemma snappily, shoving her boys back again, hard, staring at them threateningly until she is convinced they won’t go at the scabs, the _other_ _kids_ , again – and waiting for them to return to their stakes waiting for the wagons before she turns ‘round to face the frightened expressions of the scabs.

“Listen, fellas, I know someone put you up to this, yeah?”

She is surprised when the smallest responds to her, nodding once uneasily.  His knuckles are white around his papers, clothes just as ratty and torn as the boys behind her.

She makes a point of ignoring the hard scowl Wiesel fixes her with from behind the boys.

“Pulitzer thinks we’re _nothing_ ,” she says heatedly, fed by the unexpected response.  “He thinks we’re nothing more than gutter rats who’ll crawl over anything to get to a penny – even each other.  But we aren’t. We can’t stab _each other_ in the back, that’s _not_ who we _are_ . There are kids like us, all over this town – and you don’t hear us complaining that we’d rather be in school, or playing games in the streets – than selling papes and working in sweatshops and factories and slaughterhouses, doing the hard work we do all day long.  All we _all_ want is a fair deal.”

The first of the boys is caving, the hand holding his papers quivering – and Daisy’s pulse stutters a little when the tiniest spark of hope burns back up against her chest.

“We stand together,” Fitz says, repeating Jemma’s words as he limps up beside Daisy, “tha’s th’ only way we’ll get heard.  If you join our union, you’ stand with us, an’ with _all_ the kids.”

The boy takes a small, sharply impulsive step closer – letting out a shaking breath before he drops his papers, shaking his head as if he knows just as well as the rest of them that he is making a mistake.

 

“I’m with you,” he mutters, head still shaking, before glancing back at his companions. “At the end’a the day, who are you gonna trust?” He asks, voice sharp. “These guys –“ he nods towards Fitz and Daisy, then disgustedly back at Wiesel and the Delancey’s, “or them?”

The second boy lets out a similar caving sigh, letting his own papers plop to the hard ground before stepping weakly up even with the first boy.

Daisy hardly dares to breathe as she and everyone else’s eyes fall to the final boy, who still clenches his papers tightly in his hand, face gone as pale as his knuckles.

The papers hit the ground.

The smirk melts right off of Wiesel’s face.

The boys fall into line with the rest of the boys behind her, but a new buzz, a second wave of energy has finally settled fully into the formerly disenchanted union – the first demonstration of the power they wield together giving them a new life that nearly sets Daisy guard down.

“That was incredible.”

She doesn’t feel him come up beside her – somehow hasn’t even noticed his presence – but even as she whirls to face the voice, she knows exactly who it is, if only by the accompanying noise of pencil scraping paper.

“So you did show,” she says, even though she hadn’t actually expected him not to.  Her stomach flips into its usual traitorous turmoil when her eyes settle on him – he is wearing a tie in a deep shade of blue, slightly crooked on his neck – that does things to his light eyes that probably shouldn’t be legal.

His pencil lifts as he stares down at her, eyebrows furrowing.

“I said I would, didn’t I?” His expression lightens a bit, then, and he motions over his shoulder at some movement happening behind him, “brought a camera, too.  Can’t make front page without a nice shiny picture.”

Her eyes go wide as she looks back at the excited pulse of the boys behind him, realizing that they are moving around a _photographer_ and his bulky camera, who is barking orders down at the eager kids.  When she glances back at Lincoln, he is biting back a smile.  While she _knows_ he is purposely playing down the full extent of what he has done, knows he is purposely acting casual for whatever godforsaken reason he might have – it still drives her _mad_.

“You want to make us a headline,” she says in awe instead of snapping at him -- and he just shrugs, still biting his lip – but a smile is clear and full in the light dancing in his eyes.

“Get over there, Johnson.  It isn’t a union without its brave leader.”

She starts towards the camera, without needing too much further prompting, more enthusiastic than she would care to admit about the photograph – but then she hesitates, turning back to the reporter and staring up at him.

“Thank you,” she says earnestly, careful to hold his gaze.  She can’t think of a joke to make, a way to lighten the strong pulse of emotion in her veins.  She reaches out to him instead, touching his wrist gently.

She expects him to blush, but he just shakes his head, staring back at her with a soft, relaxed expression she has yet to see on him – something like focus, she thinks, but less searching.  Less intrusive.

“This is all you,” he says.  “I’m just along for the ride, I guess.”

She feels an unconscious pull nearer to him and almost gives in to it, but then a voice yells over, breaking her from the moment.

“Hey, kid – just waiting on your okay,” the photographer calls to Lincoln, followed by the whine of a dozen boys for Daisy to get her ass over to them.

She drops his wrist.

“Go get in your picture,” he says, nodding again at the rest of the boys.

This time she listens, smiling crookedly as she pushes easily through a few bodies to situate herself between Jemma and Fitz.

The camera flash flames bright and startling, burning against her eyes – and she has to blink hard for a moment after before she can see anything without a flare down the middle of it.  If the boys had energy before – it was nothing compared to the frenzy that is overcoming them now, putting a new life into them that Daisy has never seen.

She feels it, too – the energy running through the moment, through the entire group of them.  The excitement, the hopeful unexpectedness for tomorrow that has never quite been a part of their predetermined rituals.  She can’t quite assign it a label in her head, the intrepidation that burns in her veins.

And then the carts begin to roll out from behind the circulation window and everything happens too quickly for her to assign a label to it, either.

Les takes the first brave step to block a wagon, innocent confidence feeding his movements and inspiring the rest of the group to follow in turn.  But single steps is about all they get before there are suddenly men pressing in on them from all directions.

Lincoln is back at her side, and as the hired fists press in around the boys she turns frantically to him.

“Get out of here,” she tells him breathlessly, desperately, and when he opens his mouth to protest she presses on forcefully, “you aren’t doing us any good here, I doubt you can throw a punch, and they’ll never run the damn story if you get caught up in this.”

He wastes a moment she could be back protecting the yelling boys behind her by pausing.

“Be careful, Daisy,” he finally says reluctantly, taking a half a step away from her, towards the gate.  “I – we all need you.”

She nods, if only to appease him – waiting until he finally turns before she herself whirls around, trying frantically to take in everything happening at once.  The dark-clothed men seem to be led by the Delancey brothers and are certainly the backup-plan to the hired scabs – a special kind of discouragement led by fists.

It is this type of hired muscle that landed half of the Trolley strikers in the hospitals.

She ducks into the fight when Les is thrown over the shoulder of one of the Delancey’s, familiar rage billowing in her chest as she charges in, forgetting any sort of reasonable move she may have been able to play from outside the group.

It is how everything falls apart.

She hears the whistle of an officer just as she sinks a fist into the man’s stomach, ducking nimbly away from the bat he swings one handed as she seeks out the police, temporary relief filling the pit of her stomach.

They’re there to stop the hired muscle – to protect the kids getting their asses handed to them and let them settle back into their peaceful strike. They are going to help them.

Daisy catches a glimpse of Romeo out of the corner of her eye, near the group of approaching officers – throwing up an arm to defend his face from the bat one of the men swings at him.

She ducks another blow from Delancey, using the way the movement of his weight off-sets him to her advantage by grabbing Les and optimizing on the swing of the man’s upper body to pull the little boy into her arms instead – half an eye on Romeo and his attacker, waiting for the cops to grab the weapon and arrest the man for attacking the kid.

Except, they _don’t._

They join in with the muscle, without hesitation – coming at Romeo from all directions – and a breath catches in Daisy’s throat as she feels that little glimmer of hope now smothered icily in her chest.

She shakily puts Les back on his feet, kneeling down on the hard ground and holding tight to his shoulders a moment – half of her attention on the men around them, watching her back.

“Run, kid,” she tells him sharply, “run and get home fast as you can, don’t stop for anyone, I don’t care what they say.”

He either understands the gravity of the situation more fully or trusts Daisy more unquestioningly than Lincoln, because he is off bolting for the _World_ gates as soon as she says the word – along with a few of the other boys.

It takes her a precious moment too long to realize why the boys-- the never shy-away-from-a-fight stupid mess of a family she has -- are scattering.

Then she hears Fitz’s warning over the noises of fists and taunts and breaking skin.

“It’s Snyder!”

The words distract her, though, and someone she doesn’t see makes square contact to her stomach with a bat – knocking all the breath out of her and landing her hard on the ground, knuckles and knees scraping.  Her vision is blurred, like from the camera flash but far darker – but she forces herself to focus on the sharp pain to keep herself from blacking out, weakly avoiding another strike from the bat by rolling onto her side and then forcing herself swaying and dizzy to her feet.

She clenches her fists, searching out the man who holds the offending bat and clumsily ducking beneath it, landing a few sharp hits before someone else comes at her from behind – loud enough to give her enough warning that their fist only glances her still-aching side.

She hears distant familiar yelling, desperate and scared, but she has three guys on her now and can’t spare the extra attention as she ducks and jumps and punches and scrapes, still fighting with consciousness.

When her legs give out beneath her, two arms capture her from behind and she writhes frantically against them until she hears Hunter’s voice in her ear as he drags her backwards.

“Bloody hell, it’s me, _stoppit_ ,” he whines, and she gets her footing as he half carries her through the gates, shoving them both into the first alley he finds.  “Can you climb?”

She isn’t sure if they’ve been followed out, but shouting is still echoing in her ears.

“Who’s still back there?” She asks frantically as he gently guides her to a ladder of a fire escape, waiting not particularly patiently for her to climb up it.

“It’s not important.  Everyone who could get away did.”

The words aren’t at all what she wants to hear, and she pulls sharply back from the escape and him, pushing his steadying arm off of her – thinking of Jemma and her family, of Romeo surrounded by the men she expected to _save them_ – any of her friends, captured by Snyder and shoved away into the dark orphanage forever.

“Who is still back there, Hunter?!” She repeats sharply as she sways unevenly on her feet, taking another sharp step back when he reaches out for her again.

“I could get you or him, Daisy, _not_ both,” he snaps defensively, and her heart thuds, remembering the distinct cries that had echoed against her, pleading as she fought off three men.

 _Fitz_.

She stumbles from the alley, leaving Hunter to get himself out alone – racing fast as she can back towards the _World_ , throwing her weight against the locked silver fence and straining to see back to the circulation window where the battle they had never stood a chance of winning had gone down.

The courtyard is empty.

Her best friend is gone.

xx

She doesn’t know how much a ticket for the train costs but she knows that she doesn’t have enough even before she scrambles blindly up the ladder to her little penthouse, trying to ignore Fitz’s small pile of possessions abandoned now permanently at the other end of the metal structure.  She digs beneath her bed, pulling the carefully arranged pieces apart as she grabs her little bag of saved coins from their hiding place beneath it, tearing it open and shaking the icy metal into her shaking palm.

There is blood staining her knuckles, and she is too numb to be entirely aware of whether it is hers or someone else’s.

The coins barely cover her skin, and she shakes harder as she shoves them all in her pocket anyway.

She can’t just stand by and watch her boys, her _family_ , beaten and kidnapped and hurt because of a decision she made, a decision they supported because they _trusted_ her.

She doesn’t even know that Fitz will make it – not with a bum leg like his in a place like the Refuge all on his own.

A sudden burst of frustrated rage overwhelms her, and she throws it all at the shaky railing of the escape in an uncoordinated sharp movement, cold skin splitting on harsh contact with the rusted metal – the structure whining out in harmony with the angry noise that roars past her lips.

She has got her goddamn headline alright – Newsies slaughtered, their pitiful strike stampeded into the grey cracking streets alongside the rats where they belong.

She can’t stay, can’t stick around when she knows as long as she does the boys will keep fighting and bleeding for her _impulsive, stupid, reckless, selfish_ choice.

She takes a ragged breath, only realizing when the air catches icily in her throat that she has been crying.  Her gaze reaches up beyond the city, catching the last glimpses of dusky gold in the sky as the sun disappears behind the suffocating black skyline.

She has to get out.

xx

**NEWSIES STOP THE WORLD**

                         story by: Lincoln Campbell

  
                         _With all eyes fixed on the Trolley Strike, there’s another battle brewing in the city. A modern day David_

_is poised to take on the rich and powerful Goliath. With the swagger of one twice  her age,_

_armed with nothing more than a few nuggets of truth, Daisy Johnson stands ready to face the_

_behemoth Pulitzer…_


	4. Daisy and Goliath

When she paints Santa Fe, it isn’t from any image – she doesn’t study the way the soft lines between two eyebrows bloom and harden into a nose, doesn’t echo the memory of how colors darken and melt into skin, or reflect the light that shines back at her from a pair of bright eyes.  She doesn’t have anything to compare to, no fleeting memory of a smile or glance of sunlight burning through hair.

She mixes the colors more carefully than anything else, adding an extra dab of pink to brighten a soft violet to match the loud purple dress she saw a woman in a few mornings before, or swirling white and yellow and orange back and forth endlessly as she tries to catch the glimmers in the way the sunlight reaches out for her through cracks just before the darkness of the night finishes stealing it away.

She holds onto things, through the day – the things that add up to the place she has built up in the form of little clippings in her head. Filed away glimpses of the pastel sky reaching out above her fire escape, flashes of the greyscale hard mountains that grace an ad in the occasional pape she gets stuck with at the end of the day – passes of the little parks here and there, and how green bends and curves beneath rays of sun.

So when she paints, it is a matter of unloading the mass of flashes and glimpses and colors and ideas from her head, a matter of taking the canvas May provides her and dumping the entire mess out onto it – limbs and mind loosening with every stroke of the brush, every transfer of paint from bristle and thought from head to the wide open white sheet.

She is surrounded by Santa Fe in the basement of May’s theater, warm orange glow burning life into the pastel world she is building on the canvases around her.  She has been here since before the sun rise, leaving her belongings and all the pieces of her old world on the cool metal escape and showing up at May’s door, telling her that she has changed her mind, that she’d like to do another backdrop for pay.

She knew May wanted to ask about her bloodshot eyes and her black and blue knuckles and the tear stains down her cheeks, but she bit her tongue and let her in instead – unlocking the door to the paints and old, half-finished backdrops in the basement and letting her be. 

When she finally brought a brush to the drop, time smeared together as she let the colors envelope her, let her mind invert on itself and let herself sink into the place where she is barely conscious – where all she is is a vehicle to transfer the thoughts in her head on to the page, an object with no sense of up or down or anxiety or fear.

She is still in that flowing place between daydream and deep thought when she is startled back to full reality by a soft hand touching her shoulder.

“One of the boys brought this to the theater,” May says when Daisy’s tired eyes, still transcending back out of the world on the canvas -- seek out hers.  She is holding a crumpled piece of paper out to her, and only continues once the words finally register fully in Daisy’s mind, sending her steps defensively away from the woman. “I didn’t tell him you were here,” she promises, even though Daisy had never actually asked her not to. “I had a feeling they didn’t know for a reason.”

Daisy lets herself nod numbly, reaching out with a free hand to take the paper from May. 

The bruises and scrapes on her knuckles are mingled now with soft orange and nuanced pink and splashy white, in various stages of still-wet to cracking and dry.

May again pretends to not see the war wounds as she reaches into one of the pockets of her dress – similar to but not the same as the one she was in the last time Daisy was in the theater.  She pulls out a wad of cash bigger than Daisy has ever seen in one place at a time, holding it out to her as well.

She can’t help it when her eyes bulge, looking back up to the woman and beginning to shake her head in protest.

May interrupts swiftly.

“It’s all what I owe you.  I know you don’t want my charity, I wouldn’t offend your integrity by offering it.  This,” she nods down at the cash in her hand, “is fair pay.”

She says  _ ‘fair’  _ with a particular edge, a particular emphasis that speaks multitudes to Daisy.

After a moment she offers a hesitant nod, reaching to take the cash from May and shifting anxiously when it is in her hands.  It takes a moment for her to settle on shoving it deep into her pockets, down ‘till it mingles with her coins.

May starts to turn away from her, but stops at the door – glancing back at her over her shoulder.

“Just tell me you’re going  _ somewhere _ and not just running away,” she says brusquely, question hinting the edge of her tone as she watches Daisy’s reaction closely, with sharp, clever eyes.

Daisy just shrugs a bit, especially aware of the way the heavy new lump shifts in her pocket with the movement.

“Is there a difference?” She asks, voice a little smaller than she’d like it to be.

May’s characteristically stern expression goes oddly soft.

“If you go somewhere and it isn’t the right place,” she tells her, “You can always go somewhere else.  But if you’re running away, Daisy – nowhere will ever be right.”

She holds her eyes studiously for a second longer before turning through the door, pulling it shut behind her.

She doesn’t let herself think about her words – can’t, really – not sure what the answer might mean for her.  Instead, she remembers the paper in her hand – from one of the boys, no less, and she folds it open, taking a moment to let the words blur into focus in front of her strained eyes.

It is from Fitz –  _ from the Refuge _ – scribbled with her chalk that he must have still had on him from the day before.  The words are fat and short and few, to fit on the page – but they are enough to make her heart pound.

He is  _ alive _ .  Not okay, not by any means – but alright.

Daisy hasn’t managed to pull herself from her frozen position when the door opens again, and she is forming some sort of lie on her lips for May – but it is Jemma that slips through.

Relief fills her eyes when they fall on her, but it is only a moment before typical frustration lines her features.

“Thanks for letting me know you’re alive,” she snaps sarcastically, voice somewhat shrill despite the still clear relief in her light eyes, “no one could bloody find you anywhere, all Hunter could tell anyone was bad—“

“Ever think I didn’t want to be found?” Daisy interrupts dryly, and Jemma’s stare hardens into a scowl – but breaks after only a moment against the shake of her head as she rushes to takes the few steps between them, wrapping her arms around her and pulling her into a tight hug.

She resists the movement a moment, standing stark against her touch – but something in the gentle softness of the move, something about the borderline comedic way the other girl takes out the same frustration that would usually make Daisy throw a fist – makes her sink hesitantly into the comfort, patting Jemma’s back awkwardly as the unfamiliar clean smell of her hair encompasses them.

A moment later Jemma drops her hold on her and steps back – but the tension has left her expression, and Daisy is surprised to find that her own aching muscles have come just  _ slightly  _ unstrung.

Jemma offers her a little smile, pulling a paper out from her back pocket and holding it out to Daisy.

Daisy pauses to slip the letter she is still holding from Fitz into her pocket before reaching out reluctantly to take the pages.

“He did it,” is all Jemma says as she flips it open, and an odd chill races down her spine when her eyes glide over the front page photograph. Their faces smile back at her in greyscale. “Headline.   _ Above the fold _ .”

In the photo, Fitz leans on his crutch beside her, arm across her shoulders and face bright.

She swallows hard and shoves the paper back at Jemma, turning back to her paints.

“Great.”

She knows the deadness of her voice contrasts the sentiment, and she knows that Jemma will notice – but she scoops up a brush anyway, dabbing it in some paint before she turns back to one of her backdrops, hoping the movement implies soundly enough that it is time for her friend to leave.

She either doesn’t take the hint or purposely ignores it – Daisy thinks it is the latter – stepping back up beside her, holding the paper open in front of her.

“Didn’t you even look at it!?” She asks persistently, giving the paper a little shake. “Daisy,  _ headline.  Above the fold _ .”

She holds her shaking hand away from the canvas, swallowing before looking slowly, challengingly, back up at Jemma.

“And what the hell did it do?” she asks, voice sharp, straightening up as she turns back to Jemma. “Everyone was back selling papes today, weren’t they? Fitz ended up in the Refuge. We got clobbered and everyone knows it.  We  _ lost _ .”

Her friend’s expression falls and she has to turn away, pretending to get more paint on her brush even though she hasn’t even used what is still dripping off the tip.

“Fine,” Jemma finally murmurs, “Fine, I’ll give you that.  We lost the battle, yesterday.  But we are still winning the war.”

Daisy drops her brush at that, turning to her with eyes wide in disbelief.

“Did you hit your head yesterday?” She asks in disbelief -- but Jemma doesn’t get a chance to respond, as the door swings open behind her – Les filing proudly through, little arm bandaged up in a sling that makes her stomach flip even more guiltily than it has been all morning long.

The guilt for Les specifically evaporates in a snap, however, when a flash of blonde slips through the door behind him, and she realizes that the kid has  _ Lincoln _ in tow.

“Toldya she’d be here!” Les announces with a grin, and Lincoln at least has the decency to look vaguely contrite for showing up uninvited, shoulders slouched as his eyes drift wide around the paintings that surround Daisy.

“For crying out loud, what has a girl got to do to get away from you people!?” She groans as Les pushes the door shut behind them, safe and quiet basement suddenly crowded with people she doesn’t particularly want to see. She makes a point of turning from them again, back to her paint – even though whatever inspiration had been tingling from her fingertips a moment prior is long gone, now.

“Not even a thank you for our star reporter?” Jemma muses – and Daisy emphatically ignores her, watching the way the drying paint swirls together on the palette. 

An awkward silence drifts into the spaces between the lot of them, and Daisy doesn’t move – but she hears gentle footsteps on the hard stone behind her, moving across the room.

Lincoln’s voice cracks through the silence.

“It this place for real?” He asks, voice soft and pointed away from her, tinged with a gentle sort of awe.

She isn’t sure how to answer so she doesn’t, still staring at the paint stains.

“It’s Santa Fe,” Jemma tells him, voice edging on sarcasm, “Supposedly.”

She temporarily resents Fitz, the only one in the world who possibly could have told the other girl about their little secret.  But then she remembers the letter pressing against the wad of cash in her pocket, and swallows the bitter feeling hard.

“Do you come from Santa Fe?” Lincoln asks her, with that same unintentional ignorance with which he asked her if she was in art school, and she lets out a long sigh.

The silence falls again.

But this time, it is Jemma who breaks it.

“Daisy, I know this is hard for you but you have to understand that we need you,” she says gently, “You can’t give up on us now.”

It finally is enough to draw her to turn to face the trio, letting out a noise of frustration.

“No, Jemma,” she answers, voice sharp, “it isn’t hard for me.  It isn’t.  Choosing to back off so that no one else gets hurt, that decision  _ isn’t hard at all _ . My big mouth has done enough.  There is no way I am putting any of those kids  _ back  _ in danger.”

“You’re acting like someone died!” She snaps back, startling Daisy with the fierceness of her tone.  “Aside from some bumps and bruises, everyone is  _ fine _ .”

Daisy shakes her head, matching her tone.

“What, is that what you’re aiming for then? No one dying?!”

Jemma doesn’t back down.

“I’m  _ aiming _ to be treated like I deserve, Daisy,” she answers, voice edging on shrill, “just like you said – just because we’re poor, doesn’t give anyone the right to rub our  _ noses _ in it.  We deserve to be treated like people, regardless of the pennies we live off of. We’re doing something that has never been done before.  How could that not be  _ dangerous _ !?  But if we want the risk to be worth it, if we want our losses to be  _ for  _ something – we  _ have _ to follow through.”

Daisy continues to shake her head.

“Listen,” Lincoln says, stepping defensively to Jemma’s side when she falls dejectedly silent -- startling Daisy a bit, as she had nearly forgotten he was there. “Jemma has plan, and it is a clever one that  _ doesn’t _ need you.  Having you would be helpful, but I assure you, we will find a way to carry on with or without.”

She tries to resist the commanding edge to his tone, but finally lets out a long sigh and one short nod at Jemma – giving in mostly because she knows her friends won’t leave her alone until she has heard them out.

She is far too tired to put up a fight.

“What’s the plan?”

“Citywide Newsies meeting,” Jemma says in a carefully practiced manner, straightening her shoulders as she does. “A rally, where every kid gets a say and a vote. We all meet and discuss our options together, as a union. Then our president,” she looks pointedly at her, “will bring our demands to Pulitzer.”

Daisy stares at her in unblinking disbelief.

“You think they’ll let me within ten blocks of  _ the World _ , Jemma!?” She asks, and her voice scratches with overuse.

“They’re worried, Daisy,” Lincoln interrupts firmly, eyes drifting from their attentive position on Jemma to her.  She instinctively looks elsewhere, and he continues anyway. “They are shaking in their boots.  Why do you think they are coming at you like this!? Pulitzer has had me blacklisted from every news-desk in town for the article, if you show your face in the streets they will take you down – because  _ we are in control. _ ”

“You’re crazy,” she tells him bluntly, still purposely avoiding the light stare of his eyes as she does.

“Oh, you’re really one to talk about crazy,” Jemma mutters without pause, “painting places you’ve never even been.  Listen to someone else for  _ once _ , would you? Don’t you understand? You don’t have to carry the weight of this revolution on your own.  You have  _ us _ .”

She motions generally at the boys on either side of her, and Daisy allows herself a flicker of a glance at each of their expectant gazes.

Les speaks up for the first time then, stepping even with his sister and staring up at Daisy with a pleading expression she is  _ pretty sure _ she taught him.

“So you think Miss May’ll let us use the theater?”

She stares up at Jemma and Lincoln in turn, both who have let out matching noises urging Les to stop talking, but fall silent when she stares dubiously between them.

Of  _ course _ they need something.

“We’ve got Brooklyn, Daisy,” Jemma explains carefully.  “We’ve got Midtown – we’ve got all of New York.  They saw Lincoln’s article today and they all want to help us.  They all want to help  _ you _ .”

“Me?” She repeats, still completely dubious, eyes drifting to Lincoln, “that must’ve been one hell of a story.”

He shakes his head, frustration she once tried so hard to draw from him etched into his forehead.

“It  _ is _ one hell of a story,” he says, “and you and Jemma and the boys, you’re creating it.  It is all  _ you _ .  Pulitzer sees that, can’t you see? Why would he be wasting his energy coming at a bunch of streetkids like he is if he wasn’t  _ terrified _ of you?”

And  _ finally _ it hits her.

He _wouldn’t._ Pulitzer is a businessman – a smart one – and he wouldn’t waste his resources trying to smother out a non-existent fire.  Wouldn’t waste water on a cold stump.

Jemma, Lincoln – Les, even – they actually are  _ right _ .

Her friends must notice a subtle shift in her expression, an unconscious hint outside of her control – because relief sinks visibly through Jemma’s shoulders and softens Lincoln’s brow.

“Thank you God,” Jemma lets out in breathy sigh, pressing her thumb against the space between her eyebrows as Les takes another hopeful step nearer to Daisy.

“We can use the theater?” He prompts cautiously, and she chews her lower lip but nods.

“You gotta ask May, but – yes.”  She puts a gentle hand on his little shoulder as she steps past him, turning her attention on Jemma and Lincoln, who are exchanging obvious looks of relief that she ignores. “Can you make the kids see it, how you just did for me? At the rally – show them how close we are?”

“I think we were hoping you could,” Jemma says, sharing another look with Lincoln.

She nods slowly, thoughts running through her head.

“Right,” she says. “Right, okay.  I’ve… got an idea.  Talk to May about the theater.  I’ve got someone I’ve gotta see.”

She brushes past her friends for the door, mildly surprised when neither of them question or move to stop her – but the door creaks again behind her as she begins to step up the stairs.

She turns to face Lincoln.

“I promise I’m not running,” she assures him, and is shocked when he smiles quietly, shaking his head once.

“I didn’t think you were.”

She moves down a step closer to him, surprising herself a bit with the movement.  His eyes follow her lightly.

“I just wanted… to thank you, I guess. For letting me in on this.  For believing in me. I know the risk you took on me.”

She shrugs slightly, allowing her own smile to pull at her lips as she stares down at him on the lower step.

“You believed in me first.”

“You’re pretty easy to believe in.”

Silence falls between them as his eyes search her face softly, but it isn’t uncomfortable or intrusive – but nearly gentle, affirming.

“I’ve got to get to a meeting,” he says after a long moment, cracking the silence carefully. “But… I’ll see you tonight.”

Chills rush through her veins when his fingers brush across her wrist.

“Whatever you’re doing,” he adds, “be careful.”

“I’m  _ always _ careful.”

xx

She thinks she should probably let herself feel a hint of suspicion at the ease with which the guards running the fortress that is  _ the World _ ’s main headquarters let her past through the front doors – with only the flash of a second glance – but she is newly invigorated, and fighting to keep herself perched on an edge somewhere between complete reckless stupidity and bravery.

She can’t picture a stronger upper hand than bringing the man himself to her people, on her turf, and making him hear out  _ everything  _ they’ve got to say to him.

Her feet make loud echoing noises against the glistening floor of the silent hall, step after step a slapping reminder that un-shined shoes and threadbare clothes don’t belong between these walls, but instead leaned up outside, distributing the work that the people cleaned up enough to belong inside tirelessly put together.

Still, no eyes stick onto her misplaced presence as she presses forward.

“I’m here to see Mr. Pulitzer,” she announces to the woman at the front desk bigger than the whole area of her fire escape.  She is dressed in pretty shades of green, with eyeglasses perched on a nose that barely reaches over the high surface. 

“Top floor, end of the hall,” she tells her in a nasally voice that is tired but with no signs of the scratchy strain a tirelessly  _ used _ voice develops.

Daisy nods and starts to turn away, but pauses a moment when her shoes begin to squeak on the tile again.

“Thanks,” she says over her shoulder, uncultured echo of her voice as unfitting in the setting as her loud feet.  But the woman nods, and it is affirmation enough to get her feet moving again.

There is a door to the stairwell, and when it falls shut behind her she drops whatever pretense she was held to under the watchful eyes of the people outside, jumping the protesting metal steps a few at a time – hurrying her ascent to the top as best she can.  Her energy wanes as she ascends, turning around and around until  _ finally _ she turns a corner and is met with a wall.

She slowly turns back to the door she has just passed, putting a hand on the handle but taking a moment to recollect her breath, to prepare her thudding heart.

She looks straight ahead when she finally draws herself through the door, relieved when the carpeted floor of this level doesn’t call out protests beneath her feet.  She feels eyes on her, hears quiet murmuring around her – but she sets her eyes on the big double doors staring back down on her from the end of the hall, and goes.

She is nearly there when a muscled man steps out in front of her, arms crossed threateningly across his chest.

“You can’t be up here,” he tells her dryly, large eyes sizing her up without much enthusiasm.

She squares her shoulders and stares back.

“I have a meeting with Mr. Pulitzer,” she tells him with as much authority as she can muster beneath his heavy gaze, and when he opens his mouth to protest she hurries to continue, “Go ask him,” she urges, “tell him Daisy Johnson is here to see him.”

There are a few raised male voices that are muffled against the heavy wooden doors, that she can just barely make out when silence falls into the hallway as the guard continues to size her up.  Then he nods hesitantly.

“Don’t move,” he says as he turns, letting himself into the room – which falls silent when the door opens.

She watches with bated breath as it falls closed behind him, nausea ebbing against her twisting stomach.

A moment later, the door creaks and the same man steps out – letting the doorway remain open behind him.

“He’ll see you,” he tells her.

She swallows hard, but plants a told-you-so smirk across her lips – raising her chin, re-squaring her shoulders, and brushing past him into the office.

He shuts the door behind her.

Pulitzer isn’t a terribly old man – weathered and well into his years, but with greys just beginning to pepper through the bit of hair that still grows on his head (which isn’t much – overshadowed immensely by the whiskers on his chin).  He is standing at a desk on the opposite end of the room when she enters, oddly familiar icy blue eyes carefully sizing her up.

He is tall but not built as thickly as she imagined he might be, and his eyes are sharp and intelligent.

This isn’t going to be easy.  She steadies her smirk on her lips anyway, striding across the room as she reminds herself of what Jemma and Lincoln told her.

She is in control.

“Miss Johnson,” the man greets in a powerful voice, deep and rich and used to being louder than everyone else in the room, “we finally meet.”

There is a nameplate on his desk, made of solid metal that shines brighter than the gates up between his fortress and the rest of New York.  The nice, strong, gates that keep the city from grabbing at his shoulders and tearing him down into the cracks like it does to the rest of them.

“Pulitzer,” she nods, not bothering with the formality of an added title.

The office is big, bigger than her limited knowledge suggests an office really needs to be.  A shelf covers one wall, piled in papers and thick books, and there are a pair of high-backed bright red chairs turned to face the enormous desk. 

He smiles as her eyes slowly drink in the room – or at least, curls his lips – but there is a threatening air to the movement that adds no warmth or happiness to his expression.

“So which Daisy Johnson is it I am speaking to? The brave union organizer,” a dangerous pause, as his eyes slowly sweep her, sizing her up, “or the petty thief and escaped convict?”

The realization that he has spoken to Snyder settles uneasily in her stomach, drawing the smirk straight off of her lips – and it takes a belated moment for her to regain her composure.

“Which one gives us more in common?” She finally answers, hoping the ice in her tone makes up for the momentary lapse in her fearless mask.

The words crack at his own menacing grin.

“Impertinence is in bad taste,” he says, lips curling over the words, “when crawling for mercy.”

She raises her eyebrows, half of a laugh biting past her lips as she takes a strong step forward.

“Believe me, sir, I am not crawling. I just stopped by with an invite.  See a few hundred of your employees are rallying to discuss recent… disagreements. I thought it might be in bad taste,” she mocks, voice going serious, “not to invite you to state your case, straight to the fellas.  That way you don’t gotta wake up to a surprise headline like we did.”

He is as practiced a liar as she is, she realizes, and she tries not to let his unflinching demeanor eat at her confidence.

“Rally until the cows come home, my dear,” he says invitingly with the same poisonous smile, “not a paper in town will publish a word.  And if it isn’t in the papers,” a pause, as he shifts, lowering himself into his seat and softening his voice to a threatening hiss, “it didn’t  _ happen _ .”

“You may run the city,” she says, feeling herself go tense in frustration, fighting to keep the ege from her tone, “but there are some of us that can’t be bullied.   _ Even _ some reporters.”

She doesn’t like how his smile only grows.

“Such as that young man who made you yesterday’s news?” He offers dryly, brushing a few papers aside until he finds the familiar photograph, holding it up above the red velvet chairs in front of him in demonstration. 

She nods defiantly, even though an odd discomfort writhes against her, warning her that somehow, someway – he might just still be standing levels and levels above her.

“Talented boy,” he notes distantly, and Daisy forces the smile back across her lips.

She can walk away now and Lincoln will still figure out how to get the story out.  She has stated her case, done what she intended to do, and she can walk out and still take him down.

She takes a step back, beginning to turn for the door.

Beginning to feel  _ trapped _ .

“I’ll let him know you said so,” she says, proud of how strongly the words pass her lips as she takes another step away from the man.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary.”

She stops, swallowing as she turns challengingly back to face him.

He is staring with that same threatening anger at one of the chairs.

Or someone  _ in it _ .

“He can hear for himself.”

A rushed breath out her nose is all she can muster as Pulitzer nods a pointed order at the person on the other side of the chair, a hard swallow down her throat as the furniture creaks and bright blonde hair appears before the rest of him, cowering just barely – either from her or the man behind him, she isn’t entirely sure.

She can’t blink, or move at all as his light eyes meet hers, pleadingly.  There are pieces, floating around, trying and failing to form together.  A meeting, a reporter – he’s in trouble, his job is in trouble – it makes  _ sense _ .

The guilt weighing down every fiber of him, however,  _ doesn’t _ .

She can’t tear his eyes from him, but she catches a flash of Pulitzer’s smirk growing behind Lincoln’s slouched shoulders.

“I trust you’ve met my son?”

She catches whatever noise tries to come out of her mouth, biting her jaw down hard and refusing to let herself offer any reaction, any movement that might give the man satisfaction.

Something flips in her gut and gets lost echoing angrily around the rest of her stomach, leaving a space empty and her belly jumping.

_ His son _ .

Her skin tingles and after a moment more of complete, still silence, her vision blurs and she is forced to blink, long and hard, fighting not to look at frantic as she feels – heart slamming adrenaline through her with every thudding pulse.

“I offered him an easy life of wealth and leisure, an entire empire already built in his name – and instead he ran off to the  _ Sun _ and chose to pursue a  _ career  _ over a  _ legacy _ .  And he was showing real promise, until—“ he slams the paper with their story furiously down on his desk, a blatant contrast to the sing-songy echo of his voice – and Lincoln’s whole body tenses away from the noise.

She is mashing her teeth together so hard that it hurts.

“But you’re done with all of that now, aren’t you, son?” He prompts, voice taking on a practiced edge, and Lincoln’s tense muscles loosen momentarily as he takes a small step towards her, eyes clinging to hers and  _ begging _ .

“Daisy, I wanted to tell you—“ he says, voice uncharacteristically small – but she moves sharply back from him, crossing her arms as she folds herself  _ away _ from him, staring unblinking at the shelf as his words burn against her and fighting the stinging in her eyes with a dry, half of a bitter laugh.

She isn’t sure how else to  _ react _ .

“Don’t bother her with your problems, boy,” Pulitzer interrupts Lincoln sharply, and there is still that edge, that knowing lilt to his voice that tells her he still knows plenty she doesn’t, has plenty more to throw at her. “she has got enough to worry about now on her own plate.  Isn’t that right, Mr. Snyder?”

Daisy’s eyes snap back up to him at the mention of the name, and she doesn’t bother to waste energy hiding her panic as her gaze shoots terrified across the room.

A door to one side of the shelves creaks open, one she hasn’t noticed – and she doesn’t wait to get a look at the man – finally grabbing hold of the adrenaline racing through her veins and bolting for the office doors.  She throws them open with all her weight, stumbling her first few steps down the hall and praying her trek down the stairs will be easier than the race up, already routing her trail to the theater once she gets beyond the gates.

But she doesn’t make it to the stairs – two strong bodies pinning her arms from either side, twisting hard as she writhes against their grasps, until tears rise to her eyes at the pain.  She stops fighting.  There is no getting free – only hurting herself worse.

“What a fortuitous turn of events,” Morris Delancey says from one side of her, and she draws the faintest bit of pleasure when a glance sideways at his brother reveals a black eye she remembers landing on him the day prior.

She doesn’t give them the satisfaction of a response as the drag her roughly back down the hall and into Pulitzer’s office.

Her eyes only meet Lincoln’s horrified gaze a moment before she tears them away, staring at the floor instead –  _ hoping _ he hurts.

“Let me offer you an alternative scenario, Johnson,” Pulitzer says, all pretense of politeness replaced with pure venom.  “You attend this rally.  You stop this hopeless strike – and I’ll see your criminal record expunged – and your pockets filled with enough cash to carry you in a first-class compartment from New York to New Mexico and beyond.”

She can’t bite back the frustrated angry breath that rushes past her nose, and it takes all of her willpower not to lunge against the men restraining her at Lincoln.

The Delancey’s tighten their iron grasps on her anyway, and she bites back a noise of pain as their fingers bruise into her skin.

Coming here, she realizes -- confronting Pulitzer -- it was  _ impulsive  _ and  _ cocky _ , and it is going to get people hurt – just like every other goddamn decision she makes.

She slowly looks back up at Pulitzer, fixing him with as much rage as she can muster.

“There isn’t a person in this room who doesn’t know that you stink,” she spits, frustration pounding against her skull when he smiles, rising to his feet and leaning nearer to her on his desk.

“And there isn’t a person in this room who doesn’t know that  _ I don’t care _ .  Mark my words, girl, defy me and I will have you and every last one of your friends locked up in the  _ Refuge _ .  I know you’re untouchable, but it’s not right to condemn that little crippled boy to conditions like that – and what about your pal, the other brain behind your little union, that young girl – Jemma, is it? And her baby brother, ripped from their loving parents and  _ tossed to the rats _ .”

Lincoln turns sharply at that, angry, protective noise rising in his throat that his father silences with one flinch of his snake-like gaze.

Lincoln’s fists are white at his sides.

She makes herself look away again.

 

“Will they  _ ever  _ be able to thank you enough?” The man mocks, and she swallows back burning bile. “Gentlemen,” he says, addressing the Delancey’s now, “escort our esteemed guest to the cellar, so she can reflect in solitude.”

She is going to be sick if she is in this office a single moment longer.

 

“You can’t do that!” Lincoln finally growls out, turning on his father, but it is the last glimpse of the room she catches before she is tugged sharply backwards out of it, arms protesting against the shoving movements.

The descent of the stairs is far worse than the ascent, quick and stumbling – and more than once she thinks that the brother’s may accidentally pull her arms from her sockets – drawing far too much pleasure every time she swallows back a noise of pain – enjoying her new sense of fear and submission -- hopelessness the new emotions set into her frightening even on their own.

She doesn’t fight back, though – Pulitzer’s words echoing firmly in her mind.  She has no doubt he has the power and the intention to follow through on his threats.

She has hurt the other kids  _ enough _ .

They reach the bottom and turn down another level to the cellar, and the men shoving her down the last few stairs, laughing bitingly when she stumbles stinging to her knees.

“Pulitzer’s given us the discretion to handle you as we sees fit,” Morris tells her showily, jumping the last few steps and pushing past her into the darkness.  “So you’d do good to be on your very best behavior.”

She finds a stain on the dark concrete, focusing on it and biting back her angry tears.  Morris pokes at a large shape out of the corner of her eye.

“Look, you’s even got a nice old press you’s can get a nap on, should you get tired.” He throws the old covering aside and taps the hard surface mockingly, “Nice and firm.”

She stays down as he passes back by her, rejoining his brother on the stairs.

“Don’t try anything stupid, kid,” he adds, voice going threatening, “we’ll be just outside.”

She waits till the door slams before she lifts herself shaking back to her feet, breath going heavy as the entire reality of what she’s done sinks heavily into her, followed swiftly by a debilitating rush of rage.

She lets out her frustration on the old printing press, the only object she can see through the pressing darkness -- biting her tongue hard as she slams her fists onto the hard surface – holding her breath in a silent, dizzying scream as she hits the table again and again, until her muscles are shaking from exhaustion along with rage.

Even then she keeps hitting it, pain thudding through her bones and reverberating in her skull until she sinks aching to the cold cellar floor, tears burning past her eyes and down her warm cheeks.

She has ruined  _ everything _ .

She should have left while she still had the chance.

xx

Snyder makes sure to situate himself in a shadow directly in her view when he and the Delancey’s finally drag her from the basement and to the theater.  They are late – she knows it when she slips through the curtains and hears Jemma’s uneasy voice fighting to fill all the wide open cracks of the creaking and whispering theater.

“Don’t just run your mouth, Jem,” Daisy says just loud enough for her to hear as she pushes through the curtains out away from the comforting warm glow of backstage – and immediately feels hundreds of eyes on her as an excited buzz picks up in the audience, “say something that actually makes sense.”

They all know exactly who she is.

“Newsies of New York!” Jemma calls out excitedly anyway, voice already more confident than whatever she was babbling nervously prior – “Our Union’s president, who of course requires no introduction – Daisy Johnson!”

An offputtingly energetic cheer rises up through the full theater, and her heart thuds into her throat. There is no choice, no other answer – but this is going to be far more difficult than she ever imagined.

When she pulls her eyes from the crowd they fall on Jemma, something beyond relief in her expression as she presses up close to her, passing by.

“First Lincoln gone, then you –“ she murmurs, eyes wide, and Daisy swallows – startled for some impossible reason at the realization that Lincoln didn’t show.  She bites her tongue, pushes back her still steaming rage – hopes the bruises painting her arms and hands are covered by her pulled-down sleeves. “I was worried that…”

She doesn’t have to say exactly what it is she was worried about – Daisy knows.

She also knows that Jemma is going to  _ wish _ that she had taken off in just a moment.

She smiles anyway, half of an attempt at a reassuring movement that falls flat – and she finds herself unable to open her mouth to say anything further as her friend brushes past. 

Bobbi Morse is on the edge of the stage where Jemma retreats to, apt eyes settled expectantly on Daisy.

Snyder is in the curtains on the other end of the stage.

She takes a slow, shaky breath in – staring out at the faces of the hordes of hopeful Newsies – all turned up to hear what  _ she _ has to tell them.

“Mr. Pulitzer raised the price of our papes without so much as consulting anyone,” she starts weakly, “and that was a lousy thing to do.”

Despite the sorry echo of her voice through the full room, there is a loud noise of agreement that follows her words.  It only makes them stick in her throat harder, and she finds herself glancing to the opposite curtain again – imagining where Snyder lurks within as she bargains with her tongue, fights to form words.

She peers back to the other wing, where little Les has now joined his sister, watching Daisy with those wide expectant eyes of his.

She swallows.

“So, what did we do – we went on strike,” she continues her narrative, picking up some volume but no confidence in her words. “Till he lowers the price of papes, yeah? And we’ll go back to work.”

She is losing them – they know, somewhere in their subconscious – that the direction she is going isn’t the direction they are expecting.  But another less enthusiastic sound of agreement echoes the words anyway.

Her throat continues to constrict against her words.

“A few weeks later,” she continues, “he raises his price again – and don’t think he won’t – what do we do then?” There is a movement to the side of the stage – Jemma, staring at her with her jaw agape – Les, taking a few confused steps forward, looking up at her like he is waiting for a punchline.  She forces herself to continue. “Then he does it again, and again.  Fellas, we’ve gotta be realistic here. If we don’t work, we don’t get paid. And how many days can you go without making money, huh? Believe me, Pulitzer can go longer.”

Uneasy silence.

“But I’ve spoken to Mr. Pulitzer, and he’s given me his word – if we disband the union –“ an angry outcry fills the cracks between her tired words, “he won’t raise the prices for two years.”

“What the hell, Johnson?” Morse has stepped angrily from the wing, arms crossed in defiance and face set in the intimidating scowl that has set a precedent for her reputation as someone not to mess with, “What are you saying?!”

“I’m saying, I think we take the deal,” she says, first staring at Morse then out at the audience, “we take the deal and then at least we know our prices are  _ secure _ .”

The other girl shakes her head in disbelief as the uproar around them sets fully into place, angry shoving and yelling breaking out throughout the theater.

“You’re a filthy sellout is what you are,” she snaps over the noise, voice heated. “I’m sure you met with Pulitzer all right.  What’s he giving you, huh? A couple pennies extra to stomp us out?”

Instinct tells Daisy to snap right back at the other girl, but she  _ can’t _ .

She isn’t wrong.

It is Jemma, over her shoulder and staring at her like she doesn’t know her that makes her heart thud.

“ _ I’m sorry _ ,” she mouths over Morse’s shoulder, pleading, but her friend looks swiftly away.

She turns sharply back the way she came, frantic to escape the stage – the trap – all the eyes on her.  And nearly slams into Snyder, stepping out from the curtains.

He shoves the promised (threatened, she realizes now) wad of money showily into her hands, smirking as he does – and she can feel the anger around her, directed at her – expand nearly to bursting.

When there is a tap on her arm she expects it to be Morse, and whirls back around with a protective fist raised.

_ It is Les _ , and his eyes go wide and frightened at the sight of her fist raised up at him.  She drops it swiftly, hurrying to reach out to him, to apologize, to  _ explain _ – but the damage has been done.  His little eyes burn bright with tears as he steps back from her, before rushing back into his sister’s waiting arms.

“Jemma –“ Daisy says under her breath, begging for her to be able to hear her above the noise.  To  _ understand _ .

She just shakes her head, frightened eyes wide as she tugs Les away from the rising waves of anger filling the theater.

And Daisy runs.


	5. Ten-Thousand Fists in the Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some language in this chapter, dont read if that offends you

The last thing she expects when she mounts the ladder up into her fire escape is Lincoln, hair tousled as he stands faced away from her at one end of the structure – turning slowly through a short stack of curled pages.

He looks up sharply when he hears her step onto the platform, and she takes note of the dark circles blooming beneath his eyes when he turns to face her – frustration pent up in the tension of his jaw.

He looks even less befitting of the wrong setting than usual, despite the sloppy, un-put-together edge in his eyes and slump in his shoulders.  Less befitting now that she understands  _ exactly _ the place he comes from, exactly where he  _ does _ belong – in a shiny expensive office next door to his father, staring out a wide window that gives him a view of the city out far enough to see the slums she and the other kids puzzle into.

She  _ never  _ should have gotten herself into this in the first place.

“That was a real nice speech you made earlier,” he says sarcastically, voice oddly hoarse, “really conveyed the message.”

So he  _ did _ turn up.

She ignores the dig, fiery anger burning in the pit of her stomach as she crosses her arms firmly across her chest and scowls – trying and failing to press past the memory of Pulitzer’s office, past the tender bruise the stinging blow of betrayal has left throbbing in her chest.

She only grows more frustrated when angry tears return to the back of her eyes.

“How the hell did you get up here?”

She forces herself to move, shifting on her feet and drawing her eyes across him until they catch on the papers still in his hands – a stack of her drawings she keeps rolled up in a hole in the brick building, alongside the window.

“Hunter showed me.”

“You should probably warn Hunter that the next time he pisses me off I’m going to shove his hat up his ass.”

He doesn’t even look taken aback by her sharp words, just shaking his head tiredly.

“That’s real sweet.”

She smiles, wide and sarcastic.

“I’m all about sweet. He tell you to go through my shit, too?”

She nods pointedly at her papers in his hands, protective surge racing through her veins as she notes her scribbles on the top page – which she carefully fights down, with absolutely no intention of showing him how eager she is to snatch the artwork away from him.

“I saw them rolled up there and wasn’t sure what they were,” he says, voice taking on an offputtingly honest edge as his gaze drifts momentarily back to the top picture. “These drawings… they’re drawings of the  _ Refuge _ , aren’t they?”

He pauses and a vile burn rises in her throat at the pity in his eyes.

“Is this how it really is there? Three kids to a bed, rats and vermin—“

She can’t help it – she snaps, ever so slightly, pressing towards him as a scowl sinks aggressively into her features.

“Hell of a lot different from how you were raised, huh?” She mutters sharply, snatching the papers from his unflinching grasp and not hesitating to move back away from him as she rolls them unceremoniously back together, shoving them hard back into their hole in the side of the building.

His expression has gone soft, however, when she glances back at him – the same searching expression from earlier in the theater.

She doesn’t like the way it feels anymore.

“My father said that you were arrested stealing food and clothing… and that is why, isn’t it? It was for those  _ kids _ .”

She doesn’t answer, staring unmoving back at him and hoping he doesn’t notice how her jaw flinches.

He does, though – and shakes his head softly, eyes still glued onto her.

“If you were willing to go to jail for them then, Daisy – I don’t understand why you’re turning your back on these kids  _ now _ .”

Her stomach flips furiously at the words, memory of her evening too fresh in the bruises still aching up and down her arms, straight to the tips of her fingers.

He is Pulitzer’s  _ son. _

“You sure are one to be talking about turning on folks!”

“I  _ never _ turned on you or anyone else!”

“So you just _ forgot to mention it!? _ No, no. You’re right, aren’t you –“ she hisses, a dangerous, dry laugh snapping past her lips, “You didn’t turn on us -- you just  _ double-crossed us _ . To your father.   _ Your father,  _ Lincoln!”

Anger furrows quickly into his brow at the accusation, and he shifts a frustrated step closer to her.  She responds to the movement, turning fully away from him and digging her aching fingers hard against the metal railing. His voice raises.

“My father has eyes on every goddamn corner, Daisy, he doesn’t need  _ me _ spying for him.”

“Oh fuck off,” she hisses, letting go of the escape and whirling to face him, letting him see the unequivocal rage she feels towards him in her expression – hoping again, cruelly, that it hurts him as much as he has hurt her.  “I don’t want to hear this  _ shit _ from you. You  _ lied _ to me.”

“I  _ told you _ Campbell was my byline. You never asked my real name!”

She clenches her fists tightly at her sides.

“Yeah well I didn’t know I was dealing with a filthy  _ backstabber _ !”

“I didn’t do any—“

“ _ Shut up _ unless you wanna be spitting these  _ excuses _ at me with a fist in your goddamn  _ face _ ,” she growls, raising one of her shaking hands up to demonstrate.

“Give me your best shot,” he finally snaps under the pressure she wields against him, filling the leftover space between them with two purposeful strides right up to her clenched fist, escape creaking beneath him. “Go on.”

His face is etched with thorough, angry frustration as he ducks it nearer to her raised hand, urging her on – and behind the purple bruises her knuckles whiten against the force it takes her to hold herself back. His cool jaw bumps her warm fingers, and even through the shadows she can see an angry fire burning in his normally light eyes. His cheeks are flushed, and it reminds her of the night outside Jacobi’s, of the warmth between them.

She feels it now, too, hot and burning where their skin brushes.

He sways just barely back, waiting for the blow, not with any sort of intrepidation about it, either – eyes still holding firm and angry to hers, urging and challenging – and it makes her wonder, distantly, fist clenching harder against the force driving it. His frustration deepens when she hesitates.

And then her impulse takes over, fist unclenching as she presses into the last sliver of warm space between them, taking his cold cheeks between her shaking hands and rising on tiptoe to capture his lips halfway -- pressing her forehead hard against the lines in his.  He is taken entirely off guard, lips parting in shock – but his impulse is as unrefined as hers, and strong arms slink around to the small of her back and the nape of her neck, fingers twisting into her short hair as he pulls her instinctively nearer and kisses her with an equally angry fervor.

It is a long moment before reality catches up with either of them – and she is who pushes angrily off of his chest, turning fully away from him and letting out a long, growling noise of frustration as she clutches at the cold rusty rail of the fire escape, fighting to ground herself.

When the sound echoes out, silence falls between them.

Her lips tingle, and she makes a point of not looking back at him.

She is surprised when he breaks the quiet, voice crumbling tiredly through the darkness.

“Daisy, I need to know you didn’t cave for the money.”

Daisy swallows, clenching the cold rail tighter for a long moment, till her palms burn and she begins to feel the frustration give out.  She breathes in slowly, letting the cool air expand inside of her before she looks slowly back towards Lincoln.

His eyes are soft and pleading.

“Of course I didn’t. You can’t win a fight till the other guy is down and Lincoln – you heard your father. No matter how many days we go at it, he isn’t letting up,” she pauses, swallowing.  “I don’t know what else we can do.”

He lets out a long, shaking breath – but looks almost relieved.

“Well,” he says, and she thinks the tiniest of smiles might be pulling at the corner of his lips, “it’s a good thing that I do then, isn’t it?”

“Come  _ on _ .”

She doesn’t entirely intend to sound as disbelieving as she does, but her tongue is too worn from all the lies that have tumbled across it through the day – too tired to even make an attempt at masking her own uneasiness at the idea.

He fixes her with a halfhearted glare for the less-than-enthusiastic response.

“Really? You’re the only one allowed to have a good idea?” He pauses, and hesitantly steps just barely nearer to her before continuing gently, ”Daisy, being boss doesn’t mean you have to have all the right answers.  Just the brains to know the right one when you hear it.”

She lets out a surrendering breath, too tired to keep fighting.

“I’m listening.”

He reaches behind him, pulling a piece of folded parchment from his pocket and holding it out for her to take – letting her fill the space still between them to reach it, snatching it from between his fingers and stepping up to the railing as she unfolds it – straining through the darkness to read his slanting print.

“The Children’s Crusade?” She reads, voice edging on teasing – but when she peers back up at him, his eyes are solemn.

“For the sake of all the kids – in every sweat shop, factory and slaughterhouse in New York,” he recites softly, eyes boring into her.

They are  _ Daisy’s _ words.

“You made it about more than just the Newsies. You challenged our whole generation – to stand up and demand a place at the table.”

He takes back the paper when she offers it to him – shoving it back in his pocket and running an anxious hand through his horribly messy hair.  She  _ hates _ that it makes her fingers twitch, thinking of just how soft it is.

“Daisy – if we publish this, with my words… and,” something lights in his eye, and he turns back to the window, tugging her drawings back from their crevice and holding them out between them, “one of your pictures… and if all the workers under 21 read it and stayed home from work, or better yet _ , came to Newsie square _ .  A general citywide strike –  _ even my father _ couldn’t ignore that.”

Between his frantic tone, sloppy hair, and the bags beneath his eyes – she thinks he could just be losing his head to delusions of grandeur.

But the idea – if they can  _ pull it off _ – is genius.

She swallows, choosing her words as carefully as her exhausted mind will allow.

“Well,  _ just  _ one problem,” she says, tone edging on sarcasm despite how carefully she speaks, “We haven’t got any way to  _ print it _ .”

He shakes his head, smile only fading just slightly.

“There has got to be  _ one _ printing press in town that my father doesn’t control,” he answers, and his groundless optimism nearly makes her snap.  She clenches her fists in frustration, sending painful jolts through the fresh bruises.

The memory tied to the radiating pain is what makes the realization hit hits her.

“…  _ oh no.” _

His eyes widen just perceptibly, flicking over her with an edge of concern.

“What is it?”

She shakes her head, letting out a low, disbelieving breath.

“I… know where a press is that no one would never expect us to use.”

When his eyes widen this time, it is out of excitement – already brushing past her and reaching for the ladder eagerly.

“Why are you still standing there? Come  _ on _ !”

“Wait.” She says, shaking her head and raising a finger between them, “Wait – Stop,  _ stop _ .” She alters the angle of her finger so she is pointing directly at him, speaking with more force now; “ _ Stop _ . Lincoln, what is this about for you? And I don’t mean The Children’s Crusade.” She motions loosely between them, swallowing. “What’s  _ this _ about.  Is there… is there something…?”

He shifts fully back onto the platform from the ladder, watching her hand with a furrowed brow before softly finding her gaze behind it.

She drops her arm back to her side.

“Of course there is.”

He says it like there couldn’t be anything more obvious in the world, and she scowls at him.

“Listen, I know guys like you don’t end up with… girls like  _ me _ . And I don’t want you promising anything that you’re just gonna take back later.”

She pauses, swallowing again, slower, when he moves nearer to her – fighting not to give into her impulse to look away from him.

“I’m just…” she lets him touch her wrist, warm fingers gentle, as she shoves back all sense of self-preservation to rush her next words past her lips, “I’m scared tomorrow is going to come and change everything.”

He doesn’t respond, not at first – fingers tracing gently over her bruises a moment before his eyes find hers again, and he presses his parted lips just barely together as he studies her expression softly.

There is a line in his brow – the one that means concern.

“This afternoon,” he says after a breath more, voice soft between them, “you said you believed in me.”

She starts to speak – not entirely sure what she is actually trying to  _ say _ – but he rushes to fill the breath.

“Don’t,” he interrupts quickly, “I know. I know I wrecked that, and you don’t have to try to make me feel better for that.  But … I told you that I believed in you, too, and I  _ meant it _ – and you have affirmed that belief again and again.  I just – I am asking you for an opportunity,  _ another _ opportunity – to prove to you that I am worth putting your faith into.”

She still is angry with him, still can’t think of the morning in the  _ World _ without nausea coming over her in waves – but, she suddenly realizes, she isn’t angry at him for quite the reasons she thinks.

“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”

She phrases it like a question, but she knows the answer – and an odd wave of relief overcomes his tense expression.

“He’s a journalist,” Lincoln says with a dry laugh. “He is damn good at floating quotes to make them look how he wants.”

She has no idea what the hell that means, but she presses on regardless.

“Why wouldn’t you just  _ tell me _ that!?” She asks, voice edging back on anger – but she doesn’t pull away from his fingers still smoothing gentle circles over her pulse. “Are you  _ really _ that scared of your father!?”

His brow furrows indignantly.

“I am not scared of my father,” he lies, and when she raises a brow to call the bluff he just shakes his head, repeating the words, eyes settling affectionately on hers. “I am  _ not _ scared of him. I am, however, pretty  _ damn _ scared of  _ you _ .”

A grin and half of a laugh rise out of her completely unbidden – and it takes her half of a moment to realize that he is dead serious.

She sways back towards him, more hesitantly this time – using the hand he doesn’t have a hold of to dig her fingers into his shoulder for balance, perching up on her tiptoes and brushing his lips fleetingly before she presses her forehead to his, noses bumping.  He slips his fingers down her palm, tangling them loosely through hers as she speaks.

“ _ Don’t be.” _

xx

“That is some key ring,” Daisy muses as they step through the now empty entry hall at the world – trailed by a handful of newsies and a handful of Lincoln’s own ‘ _ associates _ .’ “Someone been stealing from dad?”

He doesn’t even bother glaring at her as he flips through a few keys to open up the stairwell, holding the door for her and following towards the cellar, already looking for the next key.

“The Janitor has been working here as long as I’ve been alive, and hasn’t had a single pay raise,” he tells her, somewhat distantly as he squints at the keys – finally picking one and turning it in the knob with a satisfying click as the boys gather around them. “You could say he is on our side.”

He throws the door open and this time goes first himself, stepping carefully into the darkness.  A few moments later there is a loud click, and old lights buzz to life overhead, illuminating the stairs, Lincoln at the switchboard – and one beautiful, only slightly worn printing press.

Lincoln glances at it then back up at her, shaking his head in disbelief but grinning.

“What did I do before you?”

She rolls her eyes but smirks, hopping down the stairs after him and listening to the pattering collection of feet they’ve got in tow follow behind her.

One of Lincoln’s ‘ _ associates _ ,’ passes her immediately to the press, spinning a few wheels and squinting at it real close.

“Prognosis?” Lincoln prompts the young man as he straightens, and he shrugs.

“I can see why she was retired but I should be able to get her up and running, no problem.” His studious eyes drift over to her nodding, “You’re Daisy Johnson, then?”

She smiles, stepping forward and holding out a hand, mostly because it seems appropriate.

“That’s me,” she affirms, and he takes her hand in a solid grasp.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he says, “and a  _ pleasure _ to be a part of your revolution.”

She can’t really stop herself from smirking at Romeo over the transaction when the associate returns his full attention to repairing the press – listening distantly as Lincoln shows him the print and picture, detailing how he wants them set on the page.

Then the door opens – and Daisy feels a rush of relief when she looks up the stairs to see Jemma.

“Les and Hunter are Paul Revering through the boroughs,” she tells her, all business first and foremost, entirely  _ Jemma _ , as she descends the stairs. “But I hear they’ve got Morse.  They’re telling them all to meet in Newsie Square, that we’ll bring the papers out to them and they’ll distribute them to every working kid in the city by sunrise.”

Daisy interrupts her busy babbling as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, striding up to her friend and wrapping her into a tight hug.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats, not sure whether she needs to but also not entirely caring – she has so much to apologize for.

Jemma’s arms wrap around her, too, holding her tight.

“It’s alright, Daisy. I know.”

“Is Les…?”

She laughs into her shoulder, pulling back to look at her.

“Les is just fine,” she smiles more fully as she steps away from Daisy, spying Lincoln over her shoulder and waving. “God, it is good to have the team back together.”

“Shut up,” Daisy grins – but hugs her again, fleetingly, before peeling back to Lincoln with Jemma in her wake.

He smiles warmly at them both, nodding at the now spinning press.

“Should be ready to print the first pages any minute now,” he tells them, triumphant smile pulling at his lips. “Just think – while my father is asleep in his bed, we’re here using  _ his own _ printing press to bring him down.”

Both girls can only stare at him a moment.

“Remind me  _ never _ to get on your bad side,” Daisy finally mutters through the silence, and he rolls his eyes as Jemma snorts.

Suddenly, the printing press gives a nearly violent shudder – and Lincoln moves forward, reaching onto it and grabbing a piece of parchment that wasn’t there a moment prior.

**_THE NEWSIES BANNER_ **

The headline is printed in fat neat font along the entire top of the page, followed by a careful copied print of one of Daisy’s pieces – and Lincoln’s story and plea.  Daisy presses close to his shoulder on one side, scanning across every word alongside both of her friends – heart racing.

“In the words of union leader Daisy Johnson,” Lincoln reads, projecting his voice just loud enough over the whirring machine that the room stills around them – listening. But she feels his eyes on her – not the page that her own gaze is still carefully scanning, “’We will work with you, we will even work for you – but we will be paid and treated as valued members of your organization.’”

A smattering of applause answers the words as Lincoln lowers the pape, exchanging looks with the girls as the rest of the room bustles back to work around the press.

“God, this might just work,” Jemma says softly, eyes meeting Daisy’s across Lincoln – and she thinks she might agree with her.

“Let us see!” Romeo passes by, snatching the paper – and Jemma hurries after him, trying to keep it in sight as the press continues to stutter, adding to the growing pile.

Daisy glances sideways up at Lincoln, playing her fingers quietly at the back of his hand where they brush between them.

“You’d better grab one of those and get out of here,” she suggests with a soft smile. “You’ve got a very important man to see before the morning.”

He nods lightly, grabbing a flyer but then freezing with his eyes on her – hesitant.

“Go,” she repeats, smiling softly. “I’ve got things under control here.”

“Oh, I know you do,” he laughs lightly.  “Just be careful.  Really.  And don’t tell me you always are, because I know all about that, now.”

She nods, reaching for his hand and squeezing.

“I’ll be careful.”

He offers one final nod before reluctantly letting her go, rushing up the stairs and away.

xx

This time when she lets herself into Pulitzer’s office, she can  _ feel _ the power swayed in her direction.

“You can’t just barge in here,” he scowls over his desk when she saunters through the door – but his voice is tired, and dark circles beneath his blue eyes reveal the cracks in his demeanor.

She ignores the sentiment.

“How’re you doing this morning, Joe?” She greets brightly, crossing the room in two strides as she pulls a folded copy of the banner from her back pocket, unrolling it and dropping it on the desk in front of him.

His exhausted eyes scan the paper only a brief moment before peering resentfully up at her.

“Of course you’re behind this,” he hisses, but the snakelike hiss is tired; subdued. “We had a  _ deal _ .”

She digs into her pocket again, this time for a thicker stack of papers – drawing out Snyder’s wad of money and tossing it disgustedly on the enormous desk atop the banner.

“And it came with a money-back guarantee,” she agrees, offering only a dramatic shrug in consolation to the way his eyes flame.  “Thanks again for your lessons on the power of the press,” she adds, nodding at the banner, and smiling fully when his gaze returns menacingly to hers.

“Did you read it?” She asks solemnly after a moment, probably relishing the moment far too fully, but not entirely caring if she is.  She slinks forward another step, tugging a red chair back from the desk and letting herself sink obnoxiously into it – watching Pulitzer’s reaction.

His scowl deepens.

“No doubt it is written by my son,” is his sharp reply,  _ entirely _ aware of  _ exactly _ what she is doing.

A grin breaks across the faux seriousness of her expression.

“Yeah, I’d sign him before someone else grabs him up.”

He stands up angrily at that, but Daisy doesn’t flinch – brow furrowing as he takes a deep breath to regain himself.

“I demand to know who went against my ban on printing strike material,” he says through his teeth, and Daisy swallows her smile, regarding him with her best look of wide-eyed innocence.

“Oh, we’re your loyal employees,” she assures him, “we wouldn’t  _ dream _ of taking our business elsewhere.”

When the realization doesn’t immediately click behind his eyes, she looks pointedly, slowly, down.

A vein bulges in his forehead, and she crosses her arms as she leans comfortably back into his chair – raising a brow in challenge.

“I made you the offer of a lifetime,” he snaps, circling slowly around his desk to face her. “Anyone who doesn’t act in their own self-interest is a  _ fool _ .”

The door falls shut.

“Then what does that make you!?”

Daisy follows Pulitzer’s gaze sideways, eyes settling on Jemma – shoulders squared and arms crossed defiantly.

Bobbi Morse is behind her.

Silence falls, and hardly even settles before Jemma confidently continues.

“This all began because you wanted to sell more papers,” she says, “and now your circulation is down, _ seventy _ percent!”

Daisy glances back at Pulitzer, smirking at his nervous twitching.

“Why didn’t you just come talk to us!?” Jemma finishes, wide eyes flaming.

Daisy rises to her feet at that, taking a small step towards the still unsettled Pulitzer.

“A real smart reporter once told me, the boss doesn’t always got to have all the right answers,” she tells Pulitzer, steady and serious, “just the smarts to know the right one when they hear it.”

When he still doesn’t answer, Bobbi speaks up.

“Have you looked out your window lately, Pulitzer?” She asks, voice gruff as she nods her head to the glass behind his desk, that faces out to Newsie square. “Because that might be a good place for us to start.”

It takes another long moment before the man tears his bitter gaze from Daisy, turning stiffly around the desk to stand squarely in the window. Bobbi nods and the girls slip up beside him, staring out through the dusky tendrils of morning light that stretch down from the sky, lighting up the square beyond the silver gates.

“New York is closed for business,” Bobbi tells him coolly, “ _ Paralyzed _ . You can’t get a pape, or a shoe shine. Can’t send a message, or ride an elevator, or cross the Brooklyn Bridge,” she pauses, waiting till he glances at her – so she is staring him directly in the eye. “You can’t even leave your own building.”

It is the first time Daisy has caught a glimpse of the final result of their work through the night.  The square is full and bustling, but not with the people in pretty clothes with clean faces that Daisy is used to seeing – no – the sky reaches between the buildings and edges on dirty fists, all raised in the air and pulsing towards Pulitzer.  Dirty fists connected to aching arms and tired faces, dark torn clothes – children who have hardly seen a day outside of  _ work _ in their short lives.  Children who just want their fair share.

Daisy swallows against the stinging lump that suddenly rises up her throat.

“So, sir,” Jemma fills in, still confident and icy, “what’s your next move?”

Except then the door is thrown open again, and Daisy’s heart pounds when Lincoln slips through – holding the door for May, and one more round, rosy cheeked man.

“Governor Roosevelt!” Pulitzer stumbles to address the man, turning away from the window himself as the girls step back.

Lincoln lets the door fall shut, and May settles beside him with crossed arms as Roosevelt steps towards Pulitzer, shaking his head.

“Joseph, Joseph, Joseph,” he tsks in a full, scratchy voice – and Daisy glances sideways at Jemma, exchanging matching looks of excitement. “What have you done now?”

“I’m sure once you hear my explanation –“ Pulitzer begins, and Daisy is filled with glee when the other man talks right over him.

“Thanks to Miss May bringing your son to my office, I already have a thorough grasp of the situation,” he turns to face Lincoln, who offers out a familiar folded stack of papers on cue, that the governor takes – holding out between he and Pulitzer. “Graphic illustrations included.”

And then his eyes fall onto her.

“Would you be the courageous,” he waves the papers again, “and  _ artistic _ Miss Johnson I have heard so many good things about?”

She swallows, heart thudding as she unconsciously glances at Lincoln behind him for guidance.  He bites back a smirk, motioning for her to take her hat off.

She hurries to do so, glancing back at the governor and sending her heart straight back to her throat.

“Yes sir,” she finally manages to push past her lips, and adds an odd half of a bow in for good measure.

(When she looks back up Lincoln has a hand over his face, and really, this is entirely his fault for not preparing her.)

“I hear we once shared a carriage ride,” he tells her warmly with a wink, and she smiles weakly, all bravado about her origin story suddenly entirely lost in translation.

He looks back at Pulitzer, and glances pointedly out the window towards the children behind him.

“Well, Joe, don’t just stand there,” he says with authority. “Give them the good news.”

“What good news?” He asks dryly – but his voice has lost its powerful edge.

“That you’ve come to your senses and rolled back prices,” Roosevelt answers evenly. “Unless, of course, you’d like to invite a full state senate investigation into your employment practices.”

Pulitzer looks like he’d like to snarl, but he drops his angry eyes to her.

And she sees  _ defeat _ .

“I’ll need a moment alone with Miss Johnson,” he says dryly.

Lincoln and Jemma both offer her nods of encouragement as they step towards the door – and Roosevelt pauses in front of her, squeezing her shoulder reassuringly.

“Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground, young lady. You can do this.”

She nods once, and watches him go – till the door falls shut and again it is she and Pulitzer alone, facing off – all their cards wide and open on the table.

“I cannot put the prices back where they were,” he tells her after the silence has been settled a moment. “I’m sorry but I can’t. There are other considerations.”

He is staring firmly at his desk, but she shrugs anyway.

“I get it. You need to save face in front of all these folks – I’m young, I’m not stupid.”

He finally stares up at her, scowl replaced with quiet resentment.

“Thank you for understanding,” he says, even though his voice suggests no appreciation. “I can lower the prices halfway back.  It’s a compromise we can all live with.”

The man has got absolutely no idea what her boys, the kids outside his window can and can’t live with – he has made that plenty clear – and anger boils beneath her skin as she takes an angry step closer to his desk.

“You eat our losses,” she says, dropping a hand to his desk and hoping it smudges the sheen. “From now on, every pape we can’t sell you buy back, full price.”

“That was never on the table,” he snaps. “What’s to stop the Newsies from taking hundreds of papers they can’t sell!?”

She rolls her eyes, suddenly understanding all at once exactly where all of Lincoln’s privileged ignorance stems from.

“No Newsie is gonna break their back hauling around papes they can’t sell,” she tells him impatiently, “but if we can take a few extra with  _ no risk _ , we might sell them – and your circulation will grow.”

Quiet falls between them as he takes in her words.

“It’s not a bad head you have on your shoulders,” he finally says, in a vulnerable, reasonable voice she has had yet to hear from him. He nods, just barely.

“Is that a deal then?” She prompts, holding out her hand.

Another, barely there pause.

And then he shakes on it.

xx

Jemma and Lincoln are waiting at the gates when Daisy reaches them, Roosevelt and May still standing by.  When she comes up to the shining silver Pulitzer motions for one of the Delancey’s to unlock them – and he scowls resentfully back at her smirk as he does as he says.

She steps through, and quiet rushes through the chanting crowd when she steps in front of them with Pulitzer in tow.

She raises her voice as loud as it’ll go, so everyone back to the end of the square can hear.

“Kids!” she addresses, glancing momentarily at Lincoln and then Jemma’s expectant expressions before returning her attention to the crowd – unable to bite back her smile any longer. “We won!”

She glances back to her friends, ready to rush to them and share their excitement – but then she notices something –  _ someone _ just behind Jemma.

His smile is wide and bright beneath a black eye that is just beginning to yellow back into his skin.

“ _ Fitz _ !”

She shoves past a few boys and then Jemma, throwing her arms all the way around him and his crutch and squeezing him tight, not even letting him go when she looks beside him to Jemma for an explanation.  She just grins.

“Your drawings shone a light onto the conditions of this  _ Refuge _ ,” Roosevelt answers her unspoken question from beside Jemma, looking affectionately onto her. “I’ll be launching a full investigation.  Until then, it will be shut down – and, Mister… Snyder, is it? Removed from his position.”

Daisy must unconsciously squeeze her friend tighter, because he lets out a noise of protest.

“Bloody hell, Daisy, I’ve just gotten ou’ of Hell – try no’ to kill me and sen’ me back, wouldya?”

She laughs but untangles herself from him (noticing distantly that the hand that isn’t holding his crutch is in  _ Jemma _ ’s as she pulls away. She has  _ plenty  _ to say about it – but for now, at least – she bites her tongue.)

“Sir,” she says to Roosevelt, taking off her hat again but not bowing. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.”

He just smiles.

“Your drawings are what made the change, young lady.  You have an eloquent way of making an argument come to life with a pen.”

She feels herself blush, and grins at the cracked asphalt beneath her feet.

“Thank you, sir,” she repeats.

“You know,” Pulitzer muses, coming up beside Roosevelt and regarding her with an entirely uncharacteristic twinkle in his eye that assures her that he is up to absolutely no good, “your talents might be put to good use in a daily political cartoon,” he glances pointedly beside him at Roosevelt, “exposing some of the inner workings of our own  _ government _ .”

Roosevelt’s throat bobs visibly, and Daisy is quick to shake her head, looking between the two men – unswayed by what sounds like a job offer.

“Don’t sweat it,” she tells Roosevelt.  “I’d… really better be hitting the road.”

The men take the words for their worth, but as they retreat back behind the fences, it is Les who slinks up to her out of the crowd.

“You’re going to Santa Fe?” He asks, voice tiny against the still-celebrating crowd.

She hesitates, but then nods – reaching out to ruffle the kid’s copper hair.

“You did good today, you know that?” She praises with a smile – but he pulls away from her, frowning.

“When are you going to stop with this West-ward bound nonsense!?” Jemma adds to her brother’s pout, stepping towards her with a furrowed brow of her own.

Fitz nods his own agreement.

“What has Santa Fe go’ that New York doesn’t?” He asks, limping even with Jemma.

Lincoln still stands quietly behind them – watching Daisy in silence.  But a breath passes, and he takes a cautious stride beyond the other three, holding Daisy’s eyes carefully.

“Better yet,” he murmurs, voice soft, “What has New York got that Santa Fe hasn’t?”

The words are meant just for her, but Les picks up on them.

“Yeah! New York’s got us!” He tells her proudly, and she tears her gaze from Lincoln’s to glance down at the defiant boy, watching her back expectantly.

Jemma squeezes Lincoln’s shoulder as she moves forward to glance at Les herself, and then remeets Daisy’s gaze with soft hopefulness that echoes her brother’s expression  _ flawlessly _ .

“It has,” she affirms with a smile. “And… we’re you’re family, aren’t we?”

She pause that answers her words isn’t uncomfortable – as Daisy lets her gaze wander over the little mismatched group of kids around her, watching her all with the same hesitant hope etched across their expressions.

All her friends (her  _ family _ ) begging for her to  _ stay _ .

“Did I hear something about a strike being settled!?”

The circulation front gate creaks and Wiesel’s not  _ entirely  _ unwelcome gruff voice echoes out from behind it.

“’Cuz, boy, have you kids got some papers to sell.”

Daisy steps to the side of the fence as the Lower-Manhattan boys draw themselves from the dispersing crowd and through the gates – Jemma offering her one more long, deliberate look before rounding up Les and Fitz and joining the others as they begin to move towards the circulation window.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Lincoln smiles from his unchanged position, eyes bright and taking her quietly in, “you’ve got a union to run, haven’t you? And didn’t someone just offer you a  _ pretty _ exciting job?”

“Me? Working for your father?” She scoffs whole-heartedly, and Lincoln blinks – shifting barely nearer to her.

“You… um, already work for my father,” he reminds her.

She pauses to consider the allegation, and sighs as she realizes that he is right.

“Oh yeah.”

He smiles fully, then, shuffling into the gap between them and finding her hands – tangling his fingers through hers, even though they are surrounded by people.

She feels her cheeks burn as she stares down at where his skin meets hers, but she doesn’t move to pull away.

“You’ve got another ace up your sleeve, too,” he tell her in a soft voice, head ducked near enough to hers that she can hear.

A smile tugs the edge of her lips, even if she isn’t quite sure why.

“Oh? And what would that be?”

He squeezes her hands warmly, and his smile melts into something shyer.

“Me. Wherever you go, chasing those big dreams of yours – if you want it, I’ll be right there at your side.”

His words settle an odd tingle under her skin and into the stutter of her heart.

The sun is fully up now, and the light burns gold in his hair – the same way it had the first time she saw him.  Gold like the morning rays of dusky light.

 

She has got a lot of pictures in her head -- but when she opens her eyes for a change… she is starting to see that the average little life she is living might not be quite so terrible.

“You know,” she says, drawing her gaze from his golden hair back to his soft eyes, “maybe you losers are right.  Maybe...  I don’t have to do  _ everything  _ on my own.”

“Does that mean you’re staying?” He asks as he sways nearer to her – and she smiles as she captures his lips in hers – pressing up close to him and squeezing his hands tight in hers.

Santa Fe -- the real Santa Fe -- might not stand a chance against the Santa Fe she has created up in her mind.

But the picture she has got built up in her head – she can see it everywhere she looks now, in the city.  Rocky mountains in crumbling bricks. Swatches of color in the always changing sky.  Glimpses of pastel sunsets in crinkling dresses. Snapshots of clouds through the smog.  Golden hair.

A family all around her that would take on _the entire world_ and beyond at her side, who believe in _her_ time after time.

“Hey Johnson!” Hunter yells obnoxiously across from the desk, “You in, or you just gonna make out with Pulitzer Jr all day!?”

She makes a point of kissing him harder a moment longer before drifting away, smiling.

“For now,” she murmurs teasingly against him, brushing her lips to his one more time before pulling fully away – grinning at the lightness of his eyes, following her movements. “I’d better get moving,” she says with faux seriousness past her grin, as she drifts backwards towards the  _ World _ gate.  She watches the kids still filling the square, uplifted – before glancing back to Lincoln and nodding over her shoulder towards the circulation desk, digging into her pocket for a cool coin. “The Papes don’t sell themselves.”


End file.
